Zara will repair customers' used clothes

Zara's sustainability efforts are being strengthened with its new "Pre-Owned" initiative. A project that will be launched on a trial basis in 60 UK locations on November 3 and will be dedicated to repairing, reselling and recycling one's old garments. It will be possible to repair any Zara garment, even the oldest ones, by replacing zippers or buttons or repairing seams, simply by bringing the garment to the store or sending it in after filling out an online form. It is estimated that each garment could be returned within about ten days of shipment. In addition to the repair service, the program includes a secondhand garment resell platform, in which photos of the products will be obtained from Zara's own databases by scanning the barcodes inside the garments themselves and from which information on the composition of the garment will also be obtained with the ability to add photos or details if requested. The service will be free for sellers while buyers will pay one pound more than the original price along with a 5 percent service charge.

The last part of the program then is the channel for collecting and donating used clothes, which has actually existed since 2015 but will be enriched through home pickup. The clothes will be taken to the British Red Cross and therefore it will not be necessary that all the clothes are only from Zara. Zara's head of sustainability, Paula Ampuero, however, spoke about the difficulties of textile recycling in the absence of large dedicated infrastructure in place: «We always try to see garment waste as a new resource, but it’s a huge challenge for the industry to transform a post-consumer waste garment into a new garment. Normally they resell it to other industries, for use in industrial fabrics». Although the idea of a resell program for fast fashion garments has already been tried out in different forms by H&M, COS, Nike, and Levi's, which have invested in resell, this test initiated by Zara certainly seems to be the most structured initiative seen so far in the fast fashion field.