Every year, customers return piles of textiles to Pottery Barn. Someone decides a blanket doesn’t match her bedroom decor after all; someone else doesn’t like the feel of a bathrobe he ordered. For hygiene reasons, many of these products can’t be resold, so they’re thrown out—ultimately ending up in a landfill. Today, the 70-year-old home goods brand announces it will now send those textiles to the Renewal Workshop, a company that sanitizes fabrics so they can be resold.
The Renewal Workshop is known for its high-tech process of sanitizing textiles. It has a machine that uses liquid carbon dioxide, rather than water, to remove oil, particulates, and odors that degrade the life of a fabric. Since the company launched in 2014, it has partnered with clothing brands like Mara Hoffman and prAna to take returned product, clean it, then resell it at prices that are 20% to 40% lower than the original price. In its most recent research, the Renewal Workshop assessed that 82% of what fashion brands consider waste can actually be cleaned and resold.
Benson believes the company has an opportunity to show millions of customers how much waste can be avoided by reselling returned goods. “Many people have an ‘ew’ factor when it comes to buying sheets that someone may have slept on, and yet they are comfortable sleeping on hotel sheets that many other guests have used,” Benson says. “It’s all about educating people and helping to normalize these products.”
Of course, this could be good for Pottery Barn’s bottom line, too. Over the long term, reselling goods that now go to waste could create a new revenue stream. Benson says that Pottery Barn doesn’t want to stop at textiles: “Our ultimate goal is to figure out how to restore furniture in-house so we can scale these practices.”