ASOS launches Thrift+ resale pilot, takes deeper dive with second circular collection

By

Sandra Halliday

Published
Jun 6, 2022

ASOS on Monday unveiled its second circular design collection as well as launching a trial partnership with resale service Thrift+. This will “allow customers to sell pre-loved clothes to earn credit”.

The new circular design collection features 47 items based on the Ellen MacArthur Foundation’s vision for a circular fashion economy. All of the products are made from “recycled, renewable, or innovative materials”. And all of the denim pieces follow the Foundation’s Jeans Redesign Project guidelines. 

The e-tailer’s Commercial Design and Visual Director, Vanessa Spence, said that for a successful commercial future, the fashion industry "needs to be both sustainable and circular”.

Which brings us on to the Thrift+ trial. To use this service, customers need to request a free ASOS x Thrift+ bag via a link on ASOS’s website. They then send their unwanted clothes back to Thrift+ to sell on its platform. 

Once sold, they receive credits that can either be spent on other resale clothing, donated to a chosen charity (including the ASOS Foundation), or redeemed as ASOS vouchers. The company said 30,000 bags will be available for customers as part of the first phase of the trial.

As for the new circular design offer, it may be the second such collection (the first one launched in September 2020), but it’s still newsworthy. The 2020 collection involved a small number of teams that had progressed through ASOS’s circular design education programme. But this time it has taken a deeper dive as “every commercial team across ASOS was involved in the creation of the products in the collection, reflecting the wider rollout of circular design education across ASOS teams”.

This comes after the firm published a 112-page interactive Circular Design Handbook late last year that it created with the Centre for Sustainable Fashion at London College of Fashion. That aim was to help its own teams as well as external designers, students and fashion brands “design and create fashion products that support the circular economy”.

ASOS said some of the products were designed using digital 3D technology “which reduces the need to manufacture samples in the design process”.

Apart from their circularity, the pieces behave like any regular trend-led fashion collection, with cutout detail dresses, oversized, colour-blocked shirts, boyfriend jeans, printed headscarves and retro sunglasses. ASOS said the graphics and prints are “brave and optimistic, mixing retro floral with wavy checkerboard prints, all in this season’s key colours – burnt orange, lilac, and apple green teamed with undyed neutrals and indigo denims”.