When was the last time you did a closet cleanout? Whether it was last week or last year, chances are when you were done you were left with a whole lot of stuff you didn’t know what to do with. From pieces in great condition that just don’t suit you anymore, to unmentionables that have seen better days — one of the toughest parts of editing your closet is deciding what to do with all the leftovers. Should you give it to a friend, drop it off at Goodwill, throw it in the trash can? The question of what to do with our no-longer-needed or wanted clothes is actually a global crisis. So today I’ve invited an expert in textile recycling to help us edit our closets more responsibly. Let’s get started.

Hello, gorgeous. Welcome back to the Everyday Style School, the podcast that gives real-life style advice to real-life women. I’m your host, Jennifer Mackey-Mary. I’m a wardrobe stylist who’s been dressing everyday women for over 20 years, and I’m the founder of Everyday Style, where we’re on a mission to inspire women to love the way they look and give you the tools to make getting dressed easy.

At the end of last summer, we hosted a closet cleanout challenge for our Style Circle members. This challenge is always a hit, and it’s amazing to see the closet and wardrobe transformations that take place in a pretty short time. We tackle a project that most women are putting off, and our members get rid of so much baggage, both physically and mentally. Normally I’m too focused on running the challenge to participate, but this time I really needed to go through my dresser drawers and clean out things like pajamas, shapewear, swimsuits, socks, underwear — you know, all the things you probably don’t want to buy at a thrift store. So I had this big bin of stuff that I honestly didn’t know what to do with.

I know throwing clothes in a landfill is terrible, and after I watched the Brandy Melville documentary last year, I’ve been even more convicted about being responsible with my wardrobe and how I get rid of things. If you haven’t seen it, it’s called Brandy Hellville and it’s on Hulu, Max, Amazon Prime — pretty much all the streaming services. So just search yours, and if you have it, it’s definitely worth a watch.

But anyway, back to my stuff. I remember that back when I lived in Virginia, there were these textile recycling drop-off bins that were right next to the clothing donation bins, and in the recycling ones you could put all the things that you didn’t want anyone to have to sort through, and nobody else was going to want, right? So I did a search to find something similar in my area, and there was just nothing. I reached out to my friend who’s an organizer and helps people get rid of things all the time, but she didn’t know of any local recycling either. My BFF Google saved the day when it sent me to Retold Recycling, which is a mail-in textile recycling company. I tried it and I loved it so much that I thought every woman needs to know about it — first the problem, and then a super easy solution. So I did what I do, and I invited Retold Recycling’s founder, Amelia Trumbull, to our show today to tell you all about it.

I enjoyed my conversation with Amelia so much, and I especially appreciated her progress-not-perfection approach, which makes doing better actually feel doable, not like this unattainable standard that nobody’s probably ever going to reach — so why bother, right? And I know this is the first episode of the new year, and I feel like progress not perfection is a really good outlook to have in so many areas of our lives, both wardrobe-related and not. So whatever resolution or goal you’ve set for yourself this year, remember that forward progress, no matter how small, no matter how slow, still counts. Often the all-or-nothing approach is just a really great way to end up doing nothing. So if you’re on a mission to be more responsible with your wardrobe purchases and your style in general, remember to buy less, choose well, and then get rid of things responsibly. These are all topics that Amelia and I touch on in our conversation. So let’s get to it.

But before we do that, let’s meet today’s guest. Amelia Trumbull is the co-founder and CEO of Retold, a company focused on solving the problem of unwanted textiles in homes. What began as a collaborative idea among a few passionate individuals has grown into a business dedicated to sustainability and innovative solutions for textile reuse and waste reduction. Here’s our conversation — I hope you enjoy it.

Jennifer: Hi, Amelia. Welcome to the Everyday Style School.

Amelia: Hi, thanks so much for having me. It’s absolutely my pleasure.

Jennifer: I am so excited to talk to you today, because I think this is such a big issue for women — what do we do with our stuff? That’s what we’re going to talk about, but we’re going to stick a pin in that for just a second. Tell me a little bit about yourself and how you got started on this Retold journey.

Amelia: Yeah, well, I feel like it’s appropriate to say here, for this podcast, that I’m a big shopper — I love shopping. I’d say it’s almost kind of like a hobby of mine, something I used to do a lot with my mom when I was a kid, like we’d always go to the mall on the weekend, that kind of thing. So I think deep in my subconscious there was something there where I knew I was, air quotes, “consuming” a lot, and therefore there was something in the back of my brain that was like, I need to be doing a better job on this front from a sustainability perspective.

Fast forward to a place in my life where I was working with a couple of friends at a large corporate in New York, and we were always talking about how we could start a company and do better for the world. And then all of the things came together in this amazing melting pot, in that I was renovating my small Brooklyn apartment. I needed to declutter my closets and get rid of things, because I did have a lot of stuff. I needed to find a solution, so I was Ubering things to Goodwill, trying to drag stuff to a farmer’s market for collection events, that kind of thing. And it all just felt too hard. So the idea popped for Retold, which is to create an at-home, super easy and convenient recycling service for all of your unwanted clothes and household textiles. The really important thing for us was to create something that was super convenient — the idea of getting our bags into your home, being able to fill them up, and then drop them in the post, seemed way more seamless than adding carbon footprint by driving things around and whatever else. So I’d say I got to this point with Retold because it’s a little bit of my personal interest, but also the groundswell of working with my friends, who then became my co-founders, wanting to do something that would help the greater good.

Jennifer: I love that. And you and I were chatting before we hit record about how neither of us is the extreme sustainability type — and there’s nothing wrong with that, I admire it, I really do admire it.

Amelia: Yeah, we have plenty of customers who are very obsessive, for sure.

Jennifer: It’s wonderful, but I think that’s really hard — it’s very, very difficult, and that’s like a singular commitment, right? And I don’t know, just me as an everyday woman, and I know my listeners as everyday women, we want to do better, maybe without going to that 100% extreme where we’re buying one shirt and wearing it until it literally falls off our body. But we do want to do better than just chucking it in a landfill, or sending it to Goodwill, where — spoiler alert, friends — it’s gonna be chucked in a landfill. Like, that’s what’s happening to your Goodwill stuff. We’ll get there in a minute. But I love this idea of making it easy for people, because how many of us drive around with bags in the back of our car —

Amelia: Totally, totally.

Jennifer: — that we’re gonna donate. We’re gonna do it.

Amelia: Exactly. And you know, as I mentioned to you, I have a five-year-old little girl, and she grows out of things super fast, puts holes in things. Am I gonna go spend hundreds of dollars on clothes that are maybe super sustainably made, very high quality? I would love to do that, but frankly, I don’t have the means, and I don’t think most people do. So it’s like, how can you find something — okay, maybe I’m gonna grab a three-pack of leggings for her from Old Navy. But if I know she grows out of them, maybe I can give them to some friends as hand-me-downs and give them a new life that way. But if they get holes and it’s beyond repair, at least I have the comfort of knowing there’s a Retold bag that I can put the items into and declutter sustainably, get them out of the house, and know that they’re going to the right place and not to landfills, as you said.

Jennifer: Yeah, I feel like sustainability was so much easier with kids, because — I don’t know, I feel like thrifting was easier, secondhand was easier with kids. In my family, I have two sisters, and between us we have four girls, and there is this snow jacket and snow pants set that’s been worn — I have the oldest daughter, so I buy everything, and then it goes to my niece, comes back to my daughter, then goes down to another niece. That set has been worn by four people, and I bought it secondhand. If it ended up in a landfill now, it has done its job. It has done its job. But for women’s clothes, it’s so hard. It’s so hard.

Amelia: It is hard, but I also think a lot of people wouldn’t even see that re-gifting of the same item as a sustainable practice. So firstly, pat on your back for thinking about how to give something an additional life. I mean, you kind of did it out of the kindness of helping your family members, but you’re also doing something good for the earth by making sure you reuse as much as humanly possible, and also training kids at a young age that you can rewear things over and over again — find those pieces that you love and rewear them, as opposed to just buying new all the time. So there are ways you can weave sustainability into your everyday without being so rigid about it, and you can still feel good, knowing you’re doing better than maybe you did a year ago. I still think that’s a really awesome thing.

Jennifer: Yeah, a little bit better. So I’d love to talk about Shark Tank for a minute, because I am obsessed with Shark Tank — I love what it’s done for entrepreneurship, and I think a lot of people have learned a lot about business from watching it. You were on Shark Tank.

Amelia: Yes.

Jennifer: You went out —

Amelia: You went out.

Jennifer: What was that experience like?

Amelia: Oh, it’s pretty wild.

Jennifer: Hang on one second — let’s back up. Tell us exactly what Retold does, in case anyone’s like, wait, I don’t know. Let’s do that first.

Amelia: Yeah. So basically, Retold is an at-home, mail-based, predominantly take-back bag program for all of your unwanted clothing and household textiles. You come to our website, buy our yellow bags, fill them up with anything from your home that’s a textile — basically we take clothes, we can take cloth bags, the outside of your dog bed, old linens, towels, anything that’s a textile. Wash it, throw it in our Retold bags, seal them up. Most of our bags come with a mailing label attached, and then you just pop it in the post. Our whole service runs off USPS, which we’re very proud of, because the mail system’s already running all of its trucks across the US, so we’re not adding additional carbon footprint, which is great. It just means you can do all of your decluttering from the comfort of your home, and then put your filled Retold bag out for your postal worker to take with them at your front door where they’re dropping off the mail every day, or if you work in an office, drop it in the mail room, or of course you can take it to the post office yourself. So we wanted to make sure everything was super easy and convenient.

Then, when our teams receive those bags, we have recycling partners behind the scenes all over the country who open the bags and sort them. Anything that can be resold in thrift stores gets resold — given a second life there. Anything not fit for resale then gets broken down into a pulp, and that pulp is used for a variety of things — it’s insulation, it can be the inside of car seats, it’s woven into the squishy floors at some playgrounds. My personal favorite is that it’s the inside of punching bags and boxing gloves. So there are more and more uses for what the industry calls “shoddy,” and we’re really obsessive about trying to find other products we can make with that shoddy on the inside, switching it out for the virgin materials used in production. My dream — and I keep telling anyone who’ll listen, putting it out to the universe — I want to make a couch that’s got all shoddy on the inside for all of the padding, this sort of sustainable furniture. So shout out to any furniture companies out there who might be listening — give me a call.

Jennifer: That would be so cool. That would be really, really neat.

Amelia: Yeah. So really, it’s about telling a new story with your old textiles — that’s why we’re called Retold. Finding that second life for everything, and just really making sure everything’s diverted away from landfills. And as you said, there are a lot of other ways to get things out of your home, but I think the fact that we’ve created a very transparent and obvious network — okay, it goes from your house to our partners, and here are the few things that happen, and then we’re making sure nothing goes to landfill — we wanted to make that very obvious and upfront for everyone, so they can really believe in our service.

Jennifer: That is fantastic. All right, now we’re gonna talk about Shark Tank, but then we’re really going to dive into the unwanted clothing crisis, because it is a clothing crisis. But first, I gotta hear about Shark Tank. Tell me all about it.

Amelia: Yeah, so basically, I think we’d been up and running for two years — we launched in 2020 — and they have an internal casting team who actually found us. Everyone hears about this whole audition process, but we were lucky, we kind of got to backdoor in — they found us, and we were like, well, let’s explore. It wasn’t something that was really on our radar. So we went down the path with it, their production team guided us through all the vetting, and we got to the point where we’d been selected.

We showed up on the day. All we knew is that production had done some diligence on us to make sure we were a legit company, but we knew our pitch, we knew what our set looked like — bags would go in front of each of the sharks on the set, but they’d walk in and not know anything other than our names and the name of the company. That was something I didn’t know going into Shark Tank — I thought, oh, it’s all fake TV, of course the sharks know so much more, they’ve pre-planned who’s probably gonna go hard at making a deal. But that really wasn’t the case. We’d talked about which sharks we thought would be most appropriate for us to do a deal with, but we were very open.

Honestly, the way the episode shook out — I don’t know if you’ve seen our episode, but basically all of the sharks passed on us. Standing up there, after we’d nailed our pitch and were trying to put forward so many different positives about our business, and none of them believing in us, or just not quite seeing how they could get involved, it wasn’t a good fit for them — it was literally like the blood was draining out of my body. It was so mortifying and scary, thinking, oh my god, this is gonna be on national TV, this is a train wreck. I can feel the additional gray hairs sprouting from my head as we speak.

But then came Mark Cuban. He’d asked a couple of questions in the beginning — of course they cut the chronology differently to make the episode seem exciting, but we were in the tank for probably about 25 minutes. He asked questions up front, then a lot of the other sharks asked and passed, and it came back to him. He was basically like, I totally get it, I can see the future for you, I believe in your mission, I know how you can succeed, and I’m all in. He made us a deal, which I tried to negotiate because that’s what they tell you to do, but that completely backfired, and I was like, just kidding, I’ll take it, I’ll take it, get your Mark Cuban, what am I even doing.

So we did the deal with Mark, and honestly it’s been fabulous for our business ever since. We had a great influx of customers when our episode aired, and we have a lot of B2B customers because we work with brands and corporates too, creating recycling programs for them. But I think just helping us with our mission — we talk a lot about “no landfill” being our mission and our vision — getting that out to the masses has been amazing. Mark himself personally shares a lot of our social media moments, so it’s amazing exposure, and it gives us great credibility that this amazing billionaire believes in our business model, and his team has thoroughly vetted us to close out the deal — he’s looked under the hood and liked what he saw. So I think that’s an amazing validation of what we’re doing. We love working with Mark and his team, he’s super responsive, we can email him anytime and he’ll personally write back, which is amazing. What a mentor to have. We’ve honestly struck gold.

Jennifer: Well, that’s always been my question — like, okay, you go on the show, you get the deal, is it just the exposure, or are they actually involved? Do they mentor you, are they available, or is it just kind of a TV thing? But you’re saying, no, there’s actually stuff on the back end too.

Amelia: Yeah, I mean, I can’t speak to any of the other sharks, because we only work with Mark and his team. But because Mark is one of the OG sharks, he’s invested in so many companies — internally within Mark Cuban Companies there’s a structure of people who’ve worked across multiple deals, and you can really tap into them for resources. We keep up the communication, we share as much as we can, and we see the rewards from it, whether it’s business connections or guidance or help with exposure. So yeah, we’ve absolutely had a great outcome. I’ve always said the money was kind of like a cherry on top — really, working with Mark and his org has been the true value of everything. So we couldn’t be happier.

Jennifer: Well, that’s a huge compliment, because I always feel like he goes out first, right? He’s very, very selective, and he’s often the first one who’s like, I don’t see the vision, I don’t see how I can help.

Amelia: It was interesting — I didn’t realize this, but Alan, my business partner who was in the tank with me, said to me after the fact, “did you realize” — because I did a lot of the talking, so I was kind of focused and listening and looking around, but Alan was looking around a little more — “did you see that Mark was writing on a notepad the whole time?” He was doing some math, making notes for himself, formulating an opinion. So he was actually — I think he does a lot behind the scenes that maybe you don’t see in the episode. We knew he goes out a lot, very early, so the fact that he stuck around, I think, is even more credit to the business and the need for what we’re doing. He really believed in it.

Jennifer: Well, that’s a good segue to get back into the need for it, because there is an unwanted — I mean, yes, textiles, but just clothing — there is a crisis of too many clothes and not enough people who need unwanted clothes. I mean, and I understand there are a lot of people who need clothing, but I think we have this idea that when you donate to Goodwill or a charity like that, all of those things are going to end up in the hands of somebody who really needs your old sweatshirt, or it’ll be sold to provide programs for someone who really needs it. And that simply isn’t the case. There’s just too much of it.

Amelia: That’s right, that’s right. I think there’s long been a perception, especially with the tax write-off angle of the charity store, of “I’m doing the right thing.” And a lot of the time, you are — I’ll still donate some things to a charity store I know is very good quality and harder to recycle. For example, my little girl had an amazing leather jacket, and yes, that would have high resale value, so I was like, let me take that as well, because someone’s gonna pick that up, that would help. But for the most part, unfortunately, the stats we see — because obviously that’s not our business, but what we read and what we see — is that a large portion, up to 70 or 80 percent, of items do not get sold out of a charity store, and those items are disposed of.

Now, the good thing is companies like Goodwill are innovating behind the scenes, making great partnerships for more sustainable practices, but I think it’s also on all of us to get them the right things. Unfortunately, if you’ve dropped anything off, you’ve probably seen firsthand that people will include their old undies or just use it as a bit of a dumping ground. That’s horrible. I feel for those entities trying to be charitable, but if you have your sustainability hat on, it’s just not the way to go.

Jennifer: I think that’s a really good point — that when we drop things there, we’re just kind of making our problem their problem.

Amelia: Correct, correct.

Jennifer: I remember years ago I was volunteering at a community clothing closet — it was a sorting event, people dropped off clothes, we were sorting. I had my daughter with me, who at the time was like five, and I thought, won’t it be great to teach her to volunteer. And she holds up this — she’s like, “mommy, what is this?” And it’s this lacy red thong. I was like, oh no, no, no, put it down, just put it down. And I thought, why on earth would you donate that — literally to a church clothing closet. We don’t need your red knickers.

Amelia: We don’t need those. But that’s the thing — most people wouldn’t have a clue what to do with that, and honestly, if they’re not including it in their charity drop-off, they’re just putting it in the trash. And that’s why, a lot of the time, when we’re asked, “what’s your elevator pitch,” well, my elevator pitch is, what do you do with your old underwear? And 99% of the people we talk to say, oh, I put that in the trash. Gross, you know, can’t do anything with that — which, I appreciate that. But the answer is actually, wash it and put it in a Retold bag, because we can take that, break it down, and it gets a second life, and we’re avoiding landfills. It’s really about the need for education, that there is an alternative.

We work with a lot of councils across America where they don’t have a local processor to work with, so they’ll engage us to come and be the back-of-house for different drop-off events in their area, because there’s not coverage across the country. That’s where Retold can help, because we run through the mail system, we can stand up events and things like that. We just need to get the word out there that there’s a more sustainable way of decluttering your house from a textiles perspective.

Jennifer: So, what’s the problem with just throwing it in the landfill?

Amelia: Well, it’s just really bad for the environment. It creates a lot of bad gases, it’s horrible for the soil. It takes such a long time for clothing and textiles to break down, and we’re not talking all organic fibers here either — we’re talking about polyester and things that have microplastics on the inside. So, net net, it’s very bad for the environment, and it’s an expanding problem. We’ve all seen those horrific shots of landfills overseas in more underdeveloped countries, where they’re just being swallowed up by these horrible landfills. To your point from earlier, it’s this crisis around production, and unfortunately there’s the popular trend of fast-fashion hauls and things like that that just perpetuate the problem — the fashion production cycle is producing more than the population could ever hope to wear in multiple decades. It’s just the choice we have — you have to put out things in five colorways, you have to have the full size range, and it just doesn’t all sell. So where does it go?

It’s a production problem on one end and a disposal problem on the other, and there’s a lot of choices made in between. But however we can make a slightly better choice, that’s what we’re here to facilitate. That’s the work we do with brands too — we’ll take production errors and recycle them, take their returns, help guide ongoing recycling programs internally, and help consumers make better choices in their own homes, filling up our yellow Retold bags and getting those items out of landfill, because it is a really egregious problem that we haven’t been able to turn the tide on yet. I would love to hope we see that in my lifetime — with all these companies putting out sustainability goals for 2030 or 2040, I hope it all eventually stacks up and we can say, for the first time ever, landfills decreased.

Jennifer: But that feels like a long, long way away. When I was prepping for this show, I was reading some statistics, and there was something like people have three or five times as many clothes as they did 30 years ago —

Amelia: Yeah.

Jennifer: — but they wear them one-third as much. And that’s just a compounding problem. One of the things we do is really encourage people to buy what you love — I don’t believe in struggling to get dressed, because when your day starts with “I have nothing to wear, I hate the way I look, I feel frumpy,” your day’s just not going well. So I believe in not struggling to get dressed, but I also believe in buying what you love, wearing what you love, and cutting out, for lack of a better term, the crap — that clearance T-shirt, well, it’s a weird color, but it’s four dollars, okay. You’re never gonna wear the T-shirt that’s a weird color and fits kind of badly. If we could just cut out that level — I’m not saying don’t shop, I’m not saying don’t have fun with style, if people stopped doing that I don’t have a business anymore — but if we could cut out the non-essential stuff, the things you don’t love, that top 10 or 20%, first of all you have more money in your bank account, you can afford nicer things, you can really splurge on the pieces you do love, and then you’re not forced to get rid of that stuff.

Amelia: Well, that’s what I was gonna say. We’ve all been guilty of, yes, I’m gonna buy that $4 T-shirt, I’ll wear it to the gym or whatever. But after six months it’s stretched, it doesn’t hold its shape, it looks weird, and you’ve probably seen something else you like along the way. I like your point of, why not save those four dollars a couple of times and add it up, and then maybe you can get a $40 T-shirt on sale — because everything goes on sale eventually — get a coupon or whatever, get that better-quality T-shirt reduced down to $30, and maybe that lasts you two years, washes better, and brings you more joy getting dressed.

But I think a lot of the time we hang on to things because we’re waiting for the right event — oh, if there’s a ’70s fancy dress party, I’ll have that dress in the back of my closet just in case. There’s something kind of ridiculous about that too, because then you also struggle to find the things that bring you joy, if everything’s overexploded. So for me, what I try to do is buy the best quality I can — things that will last, give me joy — and then also clear out the things that are no longer serving me. I try to be relatively militant about doing a big declutter at least once a year, getting rid of things I haven’t picked up in the last 12 months. That gives me space to see what I have, and it gives me space to have fun putting together new outfits, because I’m like, oh, I forgot I had that, I can wear it with this new thing I bought. That’s fun to me, playing in my closet. And there’s something beautifully energetic and freeing about decluttering and clearing space — it welcomes in beautiful new things, and it doesn’t necessarily have to be more clothes, but maybe there’s a new style of chunky necklace I really like right now, and if I just grab that, it’ll lift five outfits I already love. So there are good ways to play in your closet.

Jennifer: Yeah, I also think closet white space is one of the most underrated things out there. When you open your closet doors and it’s just jam-packed, and you try to pull one black sweater out and all the black sweaters fall on the floor and everything’s piled and shoved — it’s very stressful. I approach everything from, you get dressed in the morning, this sets the tone for your day. And when you start with a pile of black sweaters at your feet, can’t find anything, it’s wrinkled — it just doesn’t set your day up well. But when you have a little space and a little margin, you can breathe a little better, and you can see, oh, I love that black sweater.

One thing I used to notice working one-on-one with clients: the clients who had one black sweater had a beautiful black sweater. The clients who had 10 black sweaters had 10 average-at-best sweaters — oh, well, that one has a hole, but if I wear a pin here no one will know, or that one’s a little short, or that one’s a little stretched out. Ten not-great sweaters. Just have the one, because the truth is, you’re gonna wear the one. You’re gonna wear the one good one you have, no matter how many you have. So I think it starts with not buying as much stuff — just buy what you need, buy what you love.

Amelia: Exactly. And can we also give a quick shoutout to laundry? When you have so much stuff, laundry also swamps you, and that’s never a good thing either — you end up with the whole basket that sits there all week, and it’s, I know I need to fold that. Free yourself up. If you just have the few things you really love and they work with other pieces, you can mix and match — that’s a formula for success, just in terms of mental health too.

Jennifer: Yeah. Well, when you have a ton of clothes, you don’t have to do laundry as often, and that’s when it becomes overwhelming, and then you get the Mount Laundry situation in your living room, and it’s rough. It’s rough, yeah. But I don’t know if you’ve ever read the book Laundry Love, by — oh, Patric Richardson, I think, I forget his last name. It’s so good, it’s so good, and it actually teaches you how to do your laundry — I’ll put it in the show notes. It helps you take better care of your clothes, which is another way we can keep them looking better longer.

Yeah, all right — we’re not gonna get things to Goodwill, and we want to recycle them, and finding you — I had done a major closet edit, and I had all this stuff, and I was looking for textile recycling in my area, and I hadn’t looked in a few years — I’d moved from the DC area to here in Minnesota, and it had probably been five years. There were fewer programs available now than there were five years ago.

Amelia: I understand that — have you seen that? Yeah, we’re hearing that more from councils and things like that, where there may have been some programs set up in the past. I think it’s partially two things. One, there’s not a lot of margin for some of these businesses, so it’s just not really a long-term viable thing as costs rise on all fronts — unfortunately, we’ve lost some in the industry. The other thing is there’s also been more vetting — as there’s more education and understanding of the problem, and you do some vetting behind the scenes, you’re like, oh, maybe they’re actually just shipping all of that offshore, that doesn’t feel good to me. So I think some programs have closed down because maybe they were helping things domestically, but once things are out of your hands offshore, it can get a little murky. So it doesn’t surprise me that some of those local-level programs may have gone by the wayside.

But the good news is I think there’s more of an emergence around sustainability solutions in general now. Honestly, when we were setting up the business, we had this idea of sending our yellow bags through the post, and we went and talked to a lot of these companies who are very tenured in doing recycling programs, and they literally laughed in our face — “you think you’re gonna send me occasional yellow bags through the post, of mixed goods from people’s houses?” And we’re like, yeah, what’s wrong with that? And they’re like, no way, I only take denim, or I only take white T-shirts. So the industry was a bit ripe for innovation, and it was literally after a year and a half of Googling that we found our first recycling partner who took a chance on us — yeah, okay, it’s not exactly how my business works, but we could receive those yellow bags, open them, sort through them, and that goes into our normal workflow. We were very, very lucky we found him — he could see the future, because he owned thrift stores, a brick-and-mortar location, and he could say, these guys are tackling things from a digital perspective where you can order online, that’s the way of the future. So there’s been a lot of innovation even in the past six years we’ve been working on Retold, which is super exciting.

Jennifer: I think that’s a really interesting point, that a lot of recycling programs weren’t necessarily doing the work — let’s just say, doing the work. There’s a term called greenwashing, right, kind of pinkwashing all these things — where a company seems like it’s helping the environment, that’s the mission, but behind the scenes, what’s really happening to the clothes? I was reading, in prep for this episode, about clothing recycling, and one program — I’m not going to mention who — on their website it’s like, “what happens to the clothes? We recycle this, we sell this, and the rest we donate to countries in Africa,” blah blah blah. And I was like, hold up a second — don’t try and tell me you’re doing a good thing for your fellow man in Africa when you’re just sending them all of your unwanted stuff. I think it’s a tricky one.

Amelia: It is.

Jennifer: It is.

Amelia: I think there are some structures, some countries, some places, where those kinds of programs create micro-economies — there’s very much a marketplace culture where a lot of secondhand goods change hands, and that’s good for those environments. But then there are also cases where — for example, of course they’re gonna print 20,000 Super Bowl T-shirts for both teams, in case whoever wins. What do you do with the losing team’s shirts? You shudder to think there’s a country in Africa where everyone’s walking around with a losing Super Bowl T-shirt on. So there is that perception of just dumping things offshore, and that’s obviously not something we’re a part of — everything with Retold is basically recycled domestically.

Occasionally we’ll have some things — we work with manufacturers, say they make children’s pajamas, which are very, very strictly regulated, and if they don’t meet certain standards they can’t be sold here in the US, but they’re actually perfectly good PJs and might be good for a different market with different regulations. So we’ve worked with companies to sell that to a store in Switzerland or somewhere, and of course that will go offshore in that respect. But we love to keep everything domestic, because then we can keep our arms around it. And I think while there are larger resale opportunities offshore, there’s certainly demand for the shoddy here in the US that’s being produced, so why not keep feeding that engine, and feel better knowing where everything’s going, with our trusted partners?

Jennifer: Well, have you seen the pictures of the beaches in Accra, Ghana?

Amelia: Yes. And in Chile there are also some large landfills and things like that too — it’s very scary. It goes back to your point of, why shouldn’t we let things go to landfill — I mean, have a look, is that really what you want our earth to look like? And who caused that? Us. That’s not a nature problem, like, oh, there’s global warming — I mean, we cause that too, but that’s not something facilitated by an outside source. That’s humans making poor choices and dumping that way, and it’s honestly horrifying. So we talk about being a mission-driven business — everything we do, we’re coming back to basically the visual of those horrible landfills in our minds, and that’s why we’re obsessive about getting people to recycle things in our bags.

Jennifer: Yeah. So for those listeners who aren’t familiar with the beaches in Accra — the ocean there is about six feet deep of clothing. You can just stand on unwanted clothing in the ocean. I’ll post pictures if I can find them in the show notes. When I saw that, I was like, oh, y’all, we’ve got to do better. We have to just keep one shirt — keep one shirt, don’t buy one shirt. If that’s all we can do, just do a little bit, do a little bit. If we all did a little bit, it would add up to a lot.

Are you also finding — I wondered, with all these textile recycling programs going away, if maybe five or ten years ago there wasn’t enough demand or use for recycled textiles, like, okay, now we have 10 tons of clothes and nothing to do with it — has there been a lot of innovation with what we can do with it, more of a need or a desire for it?

Amelia: There’s certainly more to come. Not only is there the adoption of the shoddy output for manufacturing purposes, but there are also these “next-generation fabric houses” emerging that are able to treat used textiles to be respun into new fabric — and the idea that that can then also be broken down again, and it’s truly cyclical. There are a lot of amazing things coming down the pipeline. Unfortunately, we’re gonna have to wait a while — it’s not imminent or at scale, it’s gonna take a few years, but it’s exciting that people are exploring that on a collection-by-collection basis and doing some production runs.

I don’t know, to your question, if there was a glut at any point — if that was the case, it was certainly before us. But I’m enthusiastic — when we attend conferences or meet with partners, we’re attached to some different industry bodies, and all of the momentum is positive. What we’d certainly love to see is a bit more regulatory and political support for this — how do we get bills passed that really move the needle? Here in California, where I am, an important bill called SB 707 has just been passed, which will basically fine companies over a certain number of sales if they don’t have proper textile recycling programs in place. There’s a similar bill being considered in New York, and I can definitely see a future where there’s more governmental support for what we’re trying to do. But I think the good news is we’re all moving in the right direction. I just wanted to pick up on one other thing you said — let’s just do a little bit, a little bit more helps. So I’d just love to say: do a little bit, and then tell a friend.

Jennifer: And that’s it.

Amelia: Tell a friend — hey, you’re not throwing out your undies, are you? Have you considered using a Retold bag? I know it’s kind of an intimate conversation, or you can frame it as, what are you doing with your old kids’ clothes, or whatever the case may be. But tell a friend, because I think that’s actually the missing link. Generally, all the data we see is, once customers start recycling with Retold — we have a subscription, or you can just buy ad hoc bags — most people start with an ad hoc bag, and once they try the service, they love it, they want it in their home all the time, so they upgrade to a subscription. People love the convenience and how it all works. We just need to get the word out there to change those behaviors — that’s why I always say, tell a friend, or pass on a bag.

Jennifer: Yeah.

Amelia: And try to create — even your crew, like maybe you do a swap around of some of your clothes, or your kids’ clothes, like you did with your family members — and then everything else that’s left over, just stuff those yellow bags and get them to us, so we can give them a second life.

Jennifer: Well, I thought it would be a really good idea to order more bags than you need and just have them on hand. Because when I get rid of stuff, I want it out of my house right now — I want it out of my house, I don’t want to look at it anymore. I like white space, everybody, I don’t like clutter. So if you don’t have that bag and you’re like, okay, I’m gonna go order a bag and wait for it — sometimes your commitment to doing the right thing just disappears, you’re like, oh, forget it, I’ll just drop it off at the local recycling or the local donation place. Just have them in your closet, have them on hand, in your laundry room.

Amelia: Yeah. As you’re sorting things and you’re like, nope, that stain’s too far gone, I’ve given it three tries — as convenient as you can make it for yourself, have them tucked away. We love saying, make it a practice. We send bags quarterly with the subscriptions, so do a quarterly mini purge — you don’t have to wait for that big annual one, though I know I generally do, but I’m recycling all the time, obviously. Give it a quarterly date — when your bags show up, you know it’s time. And maybe have a couple of ad hoc ones tucked away in your linen closet or your wardrobe, so you can grab them exactly as you said, and maintain that white space.

Jennifer: Yes. To my Style Circle members — get your bags, because we are going to be cleaning out all year. All year, we are going through things section by section. Get your bags, get your bags, I want to see lots of yellow bags in there. Because if we can all just do a little bit, right — do a little bit — and if we can get our couple thousand women keeping stuff out of landfills, I would be super thrilled with that.

Amelia: Yes, please. Yes, please.

Jennifer: So — clothes, obviously, household textiles, my curtains, my towels, all that good stuff. Do you take shoes?

Amelia: We do technically take shoes. We try not to encourage it too much, just because our bags are compostable — they’re biodegradable, actually made of cornstarch, not recycled poly or anything like other bags. The only problem is sometimes hardware breaks through the bag — if you put a high heel through it, it’s very hard to recycle. Obviously it could go to a thrift store for resale, but it’s challenging to break down that way. But if you have runners, or something soft like a ballet flat, definitely send it to us, we’ll take that. We’ll take purses too — anything that can be resold that’s good quality, you can put it in the bag.

Jennifer: We have a lot of sewists in our community — I know they’re always doing fabric de-stashes, I see that going on a lot. What about fabrics and fabric scraps?

Amelia: So this is our big innovation of the year — and honestly, shout out to all of the sewists who’ve been obsessed with Retold since the beginning. I want to say, in the first month we launched, someone emailed us and said, would you take fabric scraps? I’ve got a huge bag of scraps, off-cuts from my sewing, my quilting. And we said, oh, okay, awesome, yes. But to be honest, the back-of-house management of that was never great, because if you imagine a bag with fabric scraps and clothes in it, the fluff gets stuck on the clothes, whatever the case. So we were like, maybe you could do a bag inside our bag or whatever — but drumroll, finally this year we were able to find a recycling partner who said, yep, we’ll take the scraps as a standalone bag. So we now have a dedicated scraps bag, which you can buy the same way as our normal classic bags — solo, a three-pack, a 10-pack, or our subscription.

And honestly, our crafty community completely blew us away when we launched this — we sold out in double the time we’d forecasted. It’s gone bonkers. So please, all of you sewists, quilters, crafty listeners, grab your scraps bags as well as your classic bags for everything else in your home. We love that there’s passion around sustainability, even for those small, tiny micro items — we love that the community thinks about things that way.

The other thing I’ll shout out is we just launched our three-bags-in-a-box — the perfect little gifty item for all your eco friends. It has three bags inside, all packaged up in a really cute little box, and you can find that on our website too. We’re always having people say, hey, I want to buy this in stores, or how do I gift the bags, because they weren’t wrapped in anything — this makes it a bit more giftable. We’re recording this before the Christmas holidays, but if your loved one is really into sustainability, think ahead for Valentine’s Day, birthdays, that kind of thing — it’s a cute little gift to have in your back pocket.

Jennifer: And Christmas will come around again.

Amelia: So get a jump on it — little stocking stuffer.

Jennifer: So the three-bags-in-a-box, which is what you just showed me, those don’t have the postage labels on them, correct?

Amelia: That’s correct. We wanted something with a really nice price point, so you get the three bags for $15.50, and on the back of the box, the bags have a QR code — you scan that, come to our label generator, and buy the mailing labels, print them off as you need. So you can have these in stock, and if you’re sending two bags at one time, you just pay for the postage then and wait for the other bag later on if you need. So it’s not as much of a commitment up front, and it makes the bags super gifty — you can just hand them off and say, here you go, all the instructions are on the back, QR code, super easy.

Jennifer: That’s a great way for people to get started, or to tell a friend, give them a bag.

Amelia: Yeah, yeah, exactly.

Jennifer: The last funny thing I want to share with you — as I was preparing for the episode, one of the criticisms I found of all of the take-back-bag recycling programs was that people had to pay for them. And I was like, what an interesting concept, that it should just be free to get rid of your stuff, right? It kind of goes back to what we were talking about earlier — don’t make it somebody else’s problem.

Amelia: Yeah.

Jennifer: And so I think we just need to factor in the cost — whether that’s time, money, energy, whatever — of getting rid of our things when we buy our things. And maybe that would help us make better buying choices too. Like, ooh, okay, I can buy this $4 T-shirt, or $10 for four T-shirts, because what the heck, they’re $4, let’s get 10. Well, you can buy them, but then you’ve got to get rid of them — you’re not done at that point. I just thought it was such an interesting thing, that people were really unhappy about the fact that they had to pay to recycle their clothing, and I thought, well, somebody has to foot the bill for it — why not the person who owns the thing? It was just interesting to me.

Amelia: I agree, and we do see that resistance sometimes, to be honest — not that much, because I like to put our customers into two buckets, in a way. We have the very eco-obsessed, who are the ones Googling, much like yourself, “textile recycling near me,” and they’ll happily pay for a service they trust, which is great. And then you have people leaning into the convenience factor — that’s a little bit of me in the beginning, where I was like, how do I make this easy in my home, I will pay someone to come and do this, or get the help.

But I think there are two things that facilitate that thought process of “why should I be paying for this.” One is what we talked about earlier — the perception of being able to just take everything to Goodwill and be done with it, and then you get a tax benefit, so it’s like, I’m getting paid for dumping my stuff there, woo, double win. And also, free returns with online shopping — the mindset around that. My background is e-commerce, so I’ve seen this change over the last, I guess, 10 years — we’ve gotten to a place where returns are free because god forbid there’s any barrier to purchase. It just means people don’t have any perception of the value of what they have to get rid of — it’s on the company, they’re gonna foot the bill for that, it’s not on me, so I can make my choices, shop, get five sizes, try everything on at home, send it all back and not worry about it. But you’re not thinking about the carbon footprint, or who’s being paid to sort those items behind the scenes — if you sent something in and didn’t package it well, that might not be able to be sold again. There are implications downstream — there are humans doing that work, or machines these days, to sort and fix and resell, and someone is footing the bill for that. So we’re all providing a service, and we need to fund that service, basically — that’s why we’re a for-profit, and that’s why we try to get as much benefit as we can out of the program. For example, our subscribers get Retold Rewards for every bag they send in, where we unlock promo codes and things from like-minded brands on our rewards gallery — so even though you might be paying, we have some love we can give back in the process too, and you can feel good about what you’re doing.

Jennifer: Yeah, for sure, that’s a good win as well. I also think the connection you have to the stuff you’ve bought and the stuff you need to get rid of — I think when you’re more connected to it, you have more respect for it, and when you have more respect for it, you make better choices. Now, on the free returns thing — if companies wanted better stock in store, so if you actually go to the store you can buy what you’re looking for, and also wanted to make sizing a little more consistent, that would be great. Until then, you’ve gotta keep doing the free returns. I mean, if your size charts don’t match, if they’re not based in reality at all — people ask me all the time, oh, do you go by size charts? No, those are just made up, they could be Cyrillic alphabet characters for all they mean to me. Nothing. So, stores do better on that, and then we won’t send so much stuff back. We all gotta do our part.

We all gotta do our part. Okay, before we wrap up here — if you want to tell us more about the subscription, anything you want to tell us, go for it. Otherwise, tell us where we can find you.

Amelia: Yeah, just jump on retoldrecycling.com. We would love to give all of your listeners a code to try Retold for the first time, so I’ll get that over to you and you can put it in the show notes — we’d love to give a discount so everyone can try. Even if you order a solo bag just to give it a try, I think start there — start small, do something, and then you can graduate up to a subscription. We’d love to have all of your listeners recycling with us. And you can, of course, follow us on all of the socials — Instagram, TikTok, etc.

Jennifer: Yep, we’ll have all the links in the show notes, so if you’re driving, don’t write anything down. And then the question I like to ask everyone before we wrap up — our listeners are busy, if they take one thing away from our conversation today, what would you like it to be?

Amelia: Start small by recycling with Retold — even if it’s the solo bag — and tell a friend. Spread the word. Let’s not increase landfills anymore.

Jennifer: I love that. Amelia, thank you so much for your time today, this was wonderful. I hope everybody is inspired to do a little bit better this year — just a little bit. You don’t have to walk away feeling guilty, like you can never buy anything again. I’m not breaking up with Zara. I just — I’m not, right? Will I buy less from Zara? Sure. But am I breaking up? No. But if we can all do a little bit better, buy a little bit less, and then see it through its lifespan responsibly, I think that’s a great place to start.

That’s perfect. I want to thank Amelia again for her time, and for sharing with us how we can love clothes and love style and still act responsibly. Head over to retoldrecycling.com and use code STYLE10 to save 10% on your first purchase. When your bag is ready, don’t forget to post a pic on social media and tag both Retold Recycling and Everyday Style with Jen — we want to see all the good work that you’re doing.

Also, this year in the Style Circle, we’ll be editing our closets together little by little every single month, so we’re not doing the whole big thing at one time — and I cannot wait to see a ton of yellow bags. If you are not a member yet, I would love to have you join us — the link is in the show notes, along with all the other things we talked about today.

While you’re there, grab our free 10-Piece Style Solution and see how 10 wardrobe basics can create over 30 stylish outfits. In the guide, we’ll show you the 10 pieces you need, the outfits they create, and you’ll get a link database so you can shop the pieces in a variety of sizes and price points.

That’s all I’ve got for you today. I’ll see you next time, and until then, remember that your everyday matters, so get dressed for it. And that’s a wrap.