"As any parent knows, children just don’t stop growing!” says Samantha Valentine who co-founded children’s clothing resale platform Dotte in 2020.
Two years later, Marks & Spencer has announced its step into the resale market, signing a partnership with Dotte which allows families to buy and sell kids clothes.
It marks the latest step in the growing resale and rental industry that has so far neglected the children’s sector. But as attitudes towards sustainability continue to shift, and the cost-per-wear of growing kid’s clothes continues to be frustrating, more parents and brands are getting involved.
“All those growth spurts make kidswear one of the fastest areas of fashion, with 183 million items of kids’ clothing going to landfill every year in the UK alone. That’s why we set up Dotte! We wanted to give parents a simple way to pass on their clothes to other families, and at the same time recoup some of the money they originally spent and reduce their carbon footprint,” Valentine says.
M&S joins 16 brands currently on the platform. It will be biggest, plus they are offering a £5 voucher to customers who decide to get involved. “Having a trusted kidswear retailer like M&S onboard signals a huge step change in the industry itself, and the fact that they are rewarding their customers for selling M&S kidswear will encourage so many more families to get involved in the circular economy,” says Valentine.
Alice Duggan, Head of M&S Childrenswear, agrees. “Through the platform we also hope to extend our customer reach as we continue make M&S kidswear more relevant and the ‘go to’ destination store and website not just for uniform but for everyday style and value too.”
Elsewhere, a string of start-ups have been set up, predominantly by parents bewildered at the level of waste incurred while dressing their children. Thelittleloop and Bundlee both offer kidswear subscriptions, where you pick a monthly plan and select a rotating wardrobe, while with Circos you pay monthly per item – and can get maternity wear too.
Cirocs, who Arket have partnered with to rent their kids clothes, say on average children’s garments are worn for two or three months, before a slim 15 per cent is donated or recycled. Circos, however, circulate each item eight to 10 times
For the more fashion forward of kidswear customers, My Wardrobe HQ is a womenswear rental platform which introduced a kids section in 2020. It specialises in high end pieces for short term use - think Givenchy derby shoes, Gucci coats and Burberry baby snow suits.
“The rental model works so well for kidswear – they outgrow things so fast, yet so many of us want to stop accumulating so much new stuff, whether for environmental reasons or lack of space, or for expense,” says Sadie Mantovani, Creative Director at My Wardrobe HQ.
Mantovani understands part of the reason this market has yet to boom is much to do with the sentimental value of your offspring’s attire. “It’s smaller sector in rental perhaps [because of] the sentimentality attached to kidswear. The desire to keep that special dress worn at a special life occasion. This is why MWHQ also offers the option of a sale price for all items, offering full circularity,” she says. “You can buy it, hand it down to the siblings, then put it back onto the site to rent out and monetise it, and the take it back to keep again if you just can’t part with it.”
“By extending the life cycle of one person’s clothes by just nine months, we can reduce the environmental impact by as much as 30 percent, and we can extend the life cycle of a garment by up to fifteen times,” Mantovani says.
And My Wardrobe HQ sees it as the future. Starting April 23, the company will expand with a new kidswear rental and resale space at Harrods, refreshed monthly with new brands and styles.
“The space will double as a drop-off location for pre-loved kidswear on the last Saturday of each month, by appointment,” she says. It goes far in proving how much attitudes have changed. And if Harrods are getting on board, it is high time the rest of us do to.
