Adidas UK is working with Stuffstr, the game-changing solution to consumer waste, to keep their clothing‘in play’.
The Stuffstr system, which can be integrated into any retailer’s app or website, allows customers to sell back their unwanted clothing for store credit, regardless of condition, creating a closed loop, circular economy solution for the fashion industry.
The Stuffstr service is fully integrated into the existing adidas app. Members of adidas’ UK Creators Club loyalty programme can pull up their past five years of adidas purchases, each stamped with an instant sell-back price, generated by Stuffstr. Once a customer has selected at least £20 worth of items to sell back, Stuffstr dispatches a courier to collect the goods for free, while those living outside the area served by couriers will receive a postage-paid, mail-in bag. The customer is sentan adidasegift card for the value of the clothes and shoes they have soldback as soon as Stuffstr receives the items. Items are then either re-sold, mended so they can be re-sold, or recycled into new products.
Talking about the service, which was developed in partnership with LWARB and circular economy consultants QSA Partners as part of the Circular Fashion Fast Forward project, David Quass, Director Business Model Innovation & Brand Partnerships in adidas’ Global Brand Strategy team, said:“As a brand we realise the challenges that the linear model has brought. When we talk about throwing things away, there is no ‘away’ – stuff just ends up somewhere else. Our customers have an increased awareness of the impacts of their consumption and the challenges we face as a planet; and they’re asking how they can make a difference.
Teaming up with Stuffstr, we developed adidas Infinite Play to give our customers a better choice so that together we can share the responsibility to reduce our carbon, water and waste footprint.”
John Atcheson, Founder and CEO of Stuffstr, says, “The focus is on making this as easy as possible for the customer; in fact, we make it almost as easy to resell your items and put them to good use, as it is to throw them in the bin. By offering a bespoke service that will collect goods from your door at the touch of abutton and give you an instant reward, we believe we can dramatically reduce the 70% of the UK’s clothing that goes directly to landfill.”
Stuffstrtrialled the service with John Lewis & Partners’ loyalty customers in 2018 and achieved an unprecedented customer satisfaction response, with the average participant trading in nearly 20% of their last 5 years’ purchases. This supports industry research which suggests that we use an alarmingly small percentage of the clothing in our wardrobes: a 2018 Weight Watchers survey revealed that shoppers in the UK own £10bn worth of clothes they do not wear, while figures from waste charity Wrap show that more than 300,000 tonnes of used clothing goes to landfill in the UK every year.
Stuffstr’s mission is to address this problemby making sure that every item of purchased clothing gets used to the fullest extent possible. “If we can create a world 5-10 years down the road where every item is used twice as much, everybody wins,” says Atcheson. “The ultimate goal is to get retailers practicing circular methods and manufacturers producinggoodsthat are regenerative by design – i.e., they are designed to be repaired and re-sold, or recycled into new products. adidas is proving itself to beat the vanguard of this crucial movement.”
