Fast Fashion Aims to Mend Its Image With Repairs

Fast-fashion retailers including H&M, Uniqlo and Zara have for years enticed shoppers to buy more and more new clothes. Now these brands are pushing consumers to repair their old ones, too.

The moves come as the fashion industry works to burnish its green credentials amid pressure from consumers and regulators to lessen its environmental impact. Repairing clothes rather than throwing them away reduces waste and means fewer resources are used to make replacements. 

Zara this year is launching nationwide repair services in several of its largest markets, Uniqlo is adding repair studios to a number of stores, and H&M-owned Cos is working with a startup to help customers fix damaged dresses and jackets.

While some high-end brands have long offered to fix pricier products, the large-scale rollout of repair services is a new venture for mainstream fashion retailers whose clothes are typically much cheaper. The trend could also threaten to cannibalize sales of new products.  

Repairs and other sustainability initiatives are an “attempt to transform ourselves and the sector,” said Óscar García Maceiras, chief executive of Zara owner Inditex, at the company’s annual general meeting in July.

The retailer is rolling out its “Zara pre-owned” service, which enables customers to repair, sell or donate used clothes in stores and online, in France, Germany and Spain this year. It said the service would launch in all its major markets by 2025, having started in the U.K. late last year.

In the U.K., Zara takes in garments for repair and handles payments, but uses a network of third-party repairers to do the work. Mending a hole, for example, costs £10, equivalent to roughly $13.

The company has said repairs are key to its sustainability efforts, enabling customers to extend the life of their clothes while reducing waste.

Across the fashion industry a truckload of used textiles is either buried or incinerated globally every second, according to the Ellen MacArthur Foundation, a U.K.-based nonprofit, with 92 million tons of garments tossed annually into landfills. Clothes bought from fast-fashion brands are on average thrown away after less than a year, the foundation says.

The European Parliament in June approved a new strategy calling for fashion companies operating in Europe to adopt higher environmental standards. Lawmakers are now drafting more than a dozen new laws that will require brands to make their production processes greener and take greater responsibility for waste associated with their products.

Other global regulators and multinational bodies including the United Nations have also been pushing for change within the fashion industry. Under a U.N.-led Fashion Charter, for example, signatories including Gap, H&M and Inditex have committed to reduce their emissions. 

In response, fashion brands are taking a more active interest in the fate of their products after they have left the store, offering to recycle old clothes or keep them in circulation by patching a knee or darning a hole.

For luxury brands including

For mainstream brands selling cheaper clothes, the equation is more complex: Consumers might not see much value in repairing something that didn’t cost much to begin with, and even if they do, brands face the challenge of enabling repairs at mass-market scale.

Japanese brand Uniqlo has so far opened 21 “Re.Uniqlo Studios” around the world, five of which are in the U.S., where customers can pay $5 for a simple repair or have their items remade into something new.   

H&M Hennes & Mauritz says extending the life of clothes through repair and other means “is crucial for reducing our environmental impact.” Though analysts say there is a risk that sustainability efforts could become a drag on new sales, H&M is aiming to double sales this decade while also halving its environmental impact. 

H&M has launched repair stations at stores in seven cities, including Paris and Stockholm. The retailer also offers online repair tutorials and sells products including decorative patches designed to encourage customers to fix their own clothes. 

“This is a service that is appreciated where we offer it,” H&M Chief Executive Helena Helmersson said in an interview. But for an affordable brand “it’s more difficult to get the demand to the extent that it becomes profitable,” she said. Rather than repair, reselling used clothes will likely remain the main thrust of H&M’s waste-reduction efforts, she said.

For H&M’s premium brand Cos, whose clothes are closer to Zara’s in terms of price, the company views repairs as being more viable. Cos operates 254 stores globally, of which 20 are in the U.K. and 11 in the U.S.

Cos in May began offering U.K.-wide repairs in partnership with The Seam, a digital platform that acts as an Uber for fashion repairs, connecting individuals or businesses with an army of independent fixers. The Seam levies a 20% service charge on each job.

Demand is growing 20% month-over-month as the repairing trend gathers momentum, said Layla Sargent, who founded The Seam in 2019. Items repaired via the platform are typically worth £80 or above, she said, though that number is falling as uptake increases.

The platform allows brands to offer repairs without building their own capability, said Sargent. “Unless they have a big atelier full of skilled people, then they’ll quickly reach a bottleneck,” she said.

Demand for repairs has surged in recent years as many people warm to the idea of consuming and wasting less, said Alex Brinck, a London-based repairer who gets work via The Seam.

Brinck, who specializes in knitwear and works from her home studio, typically charges anything from £15 to £200 a job.

One recent job involved shortening a £3,000 crystal-encrusted Gucci cocktail dress. Low-value jobs “are hard to justify financially but they’re still important morally,” she said.

Fashion brands deserve credit for experimenting with repairs, but to make a meaningful difference to their environmental footprint they will need to train thousands of new repairers capable of meeting the demand, Brinck said.

“Every day I get booking requests from people all over the world—Hong Kong, the U.S.,” Brinck said, “which tells you how rare the skills are.”

Write to Trefor Moss at [email protected]