How listening to its community drove textile recycler UPPAREL to rapid growth, bigger impact — and Chadstone

UPPAREL, the Victorian textiles recycling business, has partnered with Chadstone Shopping Centre to provide garment disposal and removal services to the shopping centre’s retailers.

Every store in the centre will have access to the solution, allowing convenient recycling for unsellable customer returns, faulty items and damaged stock. 

Chadstone is the largest shopping centre in the southern hemisphere and home to both mass apparel retailers and high-end fashion outlets.

“Through its waste management framework, Chadstone’s now supporting its retailers, saying ‘Hey, if you’ve got customer returns, dormant, damaged, faulty stock, don’t put that into general waste, let’s recycle it and keep it out of landfill’,” said UPPAREL founder and CEO Michael Elias.

UPPAREL has already partnered with Target, Cotton On, Lululemon, Australia Post and many more.

“Through partnership and collaboration we recognise that we can generate much more awareness and make a greater impact,” Elias said.

UPPAREL got its start when sock and underwear subscription service Manrags began offering recycling for its socks in 2019. This turned led to increased revenue from sustainability-conscious shoppers and was the shot in the arm for a $400,000 equity crowdfunding raise in July 2020.

Speaking with SmartCompany, Elias explained the rapid growth and shift. As Manrags increased in popularity with subscribers over the world, it was presented with “a couple of key issues”.

“One being: what’s happening with our end-of-life product? And: we started questioning our responsibility in that process.”

Ever since a sock return program was devised, Elias says Manrags’ community led the journey.

“As a subscription brand, our biggest thing has always been community,” Elias said.

“It was community that told us ‘Hey, you should do underwear’, it was community that said ‘Hey, what about children’s socks? What about women’s socks?'”

When the community started asking ‘why don’t you recycle all clothes?’, the true shift began.

After introducing a solution that picked up people’s unwanted clothes from their doorsteps, UPPAREL started partnering with retailers who wanted to help their own customers recycle. It soon began recycling for the retailers themselves. Elias points out how it’s been a journey from D2C, to B2C, and now B2B.

UPPAREL’s work with business clients now makes up around 80% of its business.

It has moved facilities four times in 18 months to scale and keep up with growing demand.

“This has been monumental change and evolution and transition,” Elias said. “I can’t explain to people the level of what we’ve gone through.”

The brand collects and ships unwanted clothes and textiles to its Braeside processing plant, where it first sorts usable items for pickup by charity partners and NFPs. Then it seeks onshore recyclers for textiles, and what cannot be taken by those is recycled onsite, and processed into materials fit for filling cushions, pet beds, couches and other furniture.

“This stuff can be replacing old cushion fill that people currently seek raw materials for,” he said. “We can use things that are already in circulation. This is going from sustainability to circularity.”

UPPAREL, a certified B Corp, charges brand clients for its services the same way they’d pay waste management fees to send things to recyclers or landfill.

And Elias and the team are looking one step further, at the commercialisation of UPPAREL’s end product through the use of its processed textile as insulation in partition walls and commercial construction ceiling tiles with in-built insulation.

“This is a journey,” he said. “We didn’t know what we didn’t know and we’ve got a lot to learn as we go.”