Indians are no strangers to the concept of sustainability when it comes to apparel. Even at the most basic level, most of us have grown up seeing how to get the most number of wears out of any item of clothing. In contrast, thrifting is a culture that we are slowly but surely taking to as we learn more about how “each garment resold, saves upto six times its weight in carbon dioxide”.
Thrifting–or buying pre-loved items of clothing–is no longer a fad but a necessity in today’s world that estimates annual global fashion production at 150 billion garments (according to a study titled Sustainable Apparel Materials, conducted by Matter of Trust). Therefore, when Relove co-founders Kirti Poonia and Prateek Gupte decided to use technology to address the problem of making pre-loved clothing more accessible through their digital platform and app, they solely approached it from the point of view of scalability. Most recently, they have also ventured into the segment of factory rejects to make them reach consumers instead of landfills.
“I understood the unproductiveness of the fashion industry. Out of 150 billion garments manufactured in the world, nine billion are [lying] idle in people’s closets. I could see the first-hand impact of this because there were customers that I had who had bought 100 garments from me, and had moved from a size XL to XS. Since they had nowhere to sell those clothes, they were just lying in their closets. Eighty billion garments are what we actually end up selling and four billion are just thrown away; the proof lies in every landfill we see around,” says Poonia, who has been a fashion entrepreneur and was the former CEO of Okhai, an artisan-centric fashion brand. Given her experience in the fashion industry, she wanted to use technology to create scalable impact with Relove and now, Rescue.