While many fashion retailers are starting to offer pre-owned items or rentals, those tend to be kept separate from new collections and only feature a selected number of pieces, restricting a consumer's choices. Houdini Circle erases those limits by setting the same options for every garment: buy, rent or subscribe.
The brand has been a frontrunner when it comes to access over ownership: it started selling second-hand in 2011 and launched rental services a year later. Of course, producing quality clothing is crucial to making the model work. Houdini boasts that customers wear its Power Houdi on average 1,287 times over 10.2 years (by contrast, nearly three-fifths of all clothing globally ends up in incinerators or landfills within a year of being produced).
The company's designers ask themselves the following set of questions before any garment goes into production:
- Does this product deserve existence?
- Will it last long enough?
- Is it versatile enough?
- Will it age with beauty?
- Nothing added that isn't needed, right?
- Will it be easy to repair?
- Is it durable enough for our rental program?
- Do we have an "end-of-life" solution?
So, if your company is looking to go circular, you might want to start using that checklist first ;-)
