The Day the World Stops Shopping by J.B. MacKinnon

Author:J.B. MacKinnon [Mackinnon, J.B.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Random House of Canada
Published: 2021-05-18T00:00:00+00:00

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If fast fashion must fall in a world without shopping, that doesn’t mean it would disappear completely. Already, there are hints of what it could become.

Trove, when I visited its global headquarters, was as stereotypical a start-up as you could care to find. It is stationed in a small industrial park wedged between an artificial lagoon and the Bayshore Freeway in the outer orbit of San Francisco. Actual vultures sometimes circled overhead. Andy Ruben, Trove’s founder, seemed to know every employee on the warehouse floor by name—though in American bizspeak, we weren’t in a warehouse. We were in a Fulfillment Center.

For ten years, Ruben was a wunderkind executive at Walmart—in his own words, the “belly of the beast” of consumer culture. As a trailbreaker in sustainability in the world’s largest retailer, he saw how difficult it was to change the way we consume. He promoted energy-efficient lightbulbs, only to watch the number of bulbs in the typical American home nearly double from thirty-five to more than sixty. He saw that you could offer a long-lasting power drill instead of a made-to-break power drill, but that did not address the inherent wastefulness of having millions of American households own drills, many of them hardly ever put to use. “It was always three steps forward, sometimes two back, sometimes four,” he told me.

He left Walmart with a specific goal: to reduce new product purchasing by 25 percent. He wanted the world to stop one-quarter of its shopping.

His current business, Trove, works behind the scenes. “If you cut through everything I’ve learned, again and again it’s friction. If things are too hard, they don’t work,” Ruben said. The company’s clients, such as Nordstrom, Levi’s, Patagonia, REI, and women’s clothing company Eileen Fisher, work with Trove to build systems that make it easy for customers to bring back products they no longer want. These are shipped to Trove for inspection, cleaning and repair, and go back on sale at a discount through the brands’ websites and stores.

Despite a lot of hype, the second-hand apparel market remains small: less than 10 percent overall, and that’s including clothing rental. Still, it’s a thirty-billion-dollar business, and growing—it was one of the industries that increased sales during the pandemic. Reselling clothes is not a new concept, of course. What is new is this: there’s nothing “used” or “second-hand” feeling about the goods passing through Trove. The warehouse does not have that thrift-store smell. It’s another lesson in today’s consumer culture: clothes now pass through our lives so fleetingly that the difference between second-hand and new is often vanishingly thin.

The brands Trove works with have high standards: Eileen Fisher, for example, would only resell clothes that were in “perfect condition,” without a hint of visible stains, holes or other signs of wear. That was more than half of what they were getting back. Many of the products that come to Trove still have their shop tags—to call them “used” is actually a misnomer. America’s closets and basements,

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