Ten Years On: Australian Charity Threads Through an Ethical Response to Fashion's Excess

How have clothing brands themselves changed their own stories? As your site points out: "But our fashion partners don’t just donate brand new clothing, they also work with us in many other ways – incorporating us into their sustainability strategy as part of their community and environmental pillars, to engage their brands, staff and customers."
Fashion brands 10 years ago saw Thread Together as just a solution to a problem and would use our service as it was easy to get rid of their excess new clothing. Now fashion brands want to work with us hand in hand to co-design their sustainability agenda.

Fashion brands are telling the story of how they partner with Thread Together, not only by giving product but by donating their time, their employees’ skills, their network, and more.

Through a range of different solutions, we are able to help a fashion brand create a purpose-driven moment with a customer, whether that’s at point of sale or targeted campaign. This helps our partners engage their customers at a values-based level, driving deeper retention and engagement. We’re certainly seeing the brands themselves lean further into sustainability and actively looking for ways to build a greener future. This also applies to their employees, who are also seeking out values-based employers who act with purpose.

All of these trends have created a unique moment in time where the fashion industry is changing, and we are in a position to play a role in the transition towards a more sustainable and holistic industry.

How many fashion partners did you have in the first month? How many do you have now? How have their partnerships worked for you? And how, according to you, have these worked for the brands?
When we first started we had one partner and now we have more than one thousand.

We receive brand new clothing donations from over 1,000 fashion partners daily including RM Williams, Bendon, P.E Nation and Tommy Hilfiger—to name a few. All this new clothing would have ended up in landfills or sat in warehouses for many years and cost the brands a lot more.

We keep that fashion out of landfills and bring them back into circulation through giving those to people in need. We want to dignify people who are in very difficult situations by being able to choose with dignity the clothing that best represents themselves.

On the other side, as your website mentions, there are over 500 charities. That's not a small number. Again, was it difficult to convince charities at the beginning that the Thread Together idea would work?
Today, we partner with nearly one thousand charities and welfare agencies working with vulnerable and marginalised individuals, families and communities. These agencies connect us and help us provide clothing to many people experiencing vulnerability.

Almost all of these agencies reach out to us directly to access the service which is delivered at no cost.

It hasn’t been too difficult in building the charity network as there is a very clear need for brand new clothing for those experiencing hardship or vulnerability. Our service not only eliminates the need to sort used items, it importantly enables a charity or agency to select items of clothing that match the unique needs of their clients.

We make it easy for charities to onboard with us and then engage with our service in one of four ways.

• Online: Case workers request clothing online and teams of volunteers sort, pick and pack online “orders” which are sent all around the country.
• Mobile wardrobes: A fleet of vehicles with custom fitted walk-in wardrobes take new clothes and footwear to our community partners. Clients are invited to walk into the mobile wardrobe and select the clothing the matches their style.
• Clothing hubs: Our community partners refer their clients into our "retail shops” which are exclusive for people experiencing vulnerability. Individuals are able to browse, try-on and select clothing.
• Modular wardrobes: We install a modular wardrobe solution into women's crisis accommodation centres (refuges or shelters) so that women (and their children) can access essential clothing on arrival (e.g. underwear, sleepwear, lounge-wear, etc).

Providing choice is very important as this goes a long way to restore dignity and create hope for a better tomorrow.

Unfortunately, there is an ever-growing need whether that is the increasing number of people experiencing homelessness or domestic violence through to those impacted by fires, floods and the pandemic.

How do you work with the charities? Do you keep track of how the charities themselves work? Or is it embedded into your services system itself?
We work collaboratively with charities to understand the needs of their clients and how we can best work together to help more people. Each of our distribution channels has dignity and care at the heart of them to ensure the individuals accessing our service are treated with the highest amount of respect.

During the pandemic, we saw a rise in domestic violence incidents with an increased number of women and children seeking shelter. Our crisis accommodations partners needed clothing quicker than ever and we responded to this with the roll out of our modular wardrobes, which are in-built wardrobes within the accommodation that provide a semi-permanent supply of essential clothing such as underwear, lounge wear, pyjamas, pants and t-shirts to give immediate access to those women and children who are facing very challenging times.

Additionally, we were able to partner with local charities on the ground in Lismore and the Northern regions of New South Wales, deploying a range of pop-up stores, mobile wardrobes and direct support to the charities on the ground so we could support local communities.

Vulnerability takes so many different forms, shapes and sizes. So being able to connect with our charity partners, understand the clients they work with and make sure that we're tailoring to them is vital to the success of the organisation.

"From those who have too much, to those who have too little." Do you think in many ways it's still the same in 2022 as it was in 2012? Broadly, the fashion industry is still about excess, and there are still reports of brands incinerating their unsold inventories. Comments, please.
We definitely see this as a central part of what we do. Yes, unfortunately there is still a lot of excess in the fashion industry and whilst many brands we work with are trying hard to change and adopt a more circular approach it will take time. The positive step is that the industry recognises this and instead of once sending their garments to landfill they want to protect the planet and support people. We are tackling the issues that face the fashion industry collaboratively to ensure steps and changes are made to reduce excess. The exciting moment is witnessing the momentum building with the fashion industry itself to drive change.

Hundreds of fashion partners and charity partners. It's a full-scale operation. How have you built up your logistics system over the years? Also, how many individual pieces of apparel do you handle every month?
As we are a small team we work in an agile way and have invested and leverage technology to ensure we can scale our operations in the most effective way. We have worked with partners across all aspects to our operations to create an efficient and effective operation from the way we manage project tasks, picking and packing process, warehousing and fundraising.

Although we are 10 years old, we continue to operate with a start-up mindset to learn fast and keep growing as we go. Most recently—as our operations expand— we have been implementing an RFID solution to help us better track inventory on hand at any given moment.

In a typical month we handle more than 250,000 units. This involves receiving, sorting the clothes into categories and sizes and then fulfilling requests and replenishing our pick faces.

We currently have approximately 1 million units of clothing on hand to distribute. Ultimately, at the core of it we wouldn’t be successful without the dedicated help of our community and corporate volunteers, who bring the much-needed human touch to our operations.

It's exemplary work. Do people from other parts of the world get in touch with you wanting to replicate/emulate your idea?
Thank you. We are proud of the work we do and couldn’t do it without our network of partners. Often fashion brands from around the world reach out and enquire if our service is available in their country.

To our knowledge, we are not aware of anyone else partnering with the fashion industry in their country to provide such a service.

We don’t hold any trade secrets and want to help all to keep clothing in circulation at its highest value for as long as possible. A collaborative approach is the only way we will make meaningful change to such challenging issues.