Why We Need to Make the Circular Choice, the Easiest Choice
CFC Member Spotlight: Jennifer Barrios of Fashion Reframe
Author and interviewer: Stella Hertantyo
Jennifer Barrios is the founder of Fashion Reframe, a consultancy helping brands move toward circularity in fashion. With over 15 years of experience in the apparel industry, her expertise lies in product creation, innovation, and storytelling with a focus now on circular business models.
Knowing the ins and outs of making clothes in a linear model means that she also understands the challenges of moving toward circularity. With this in mind, Jennifer is helping brands identify new ways of working through portfolio analysis, product briefing, process mapping, and circular business model education.
I interviewed Jennifer in the Conscious Fashion Collective Membership as part of our Member Spotlight interview series.
Below are some of the highlights from the conversation, including:
Why we need to make sure the conscious choice is the easiest choice for consumers,
How to figure out which elements of circularity to prioritize in your brand,
And how brands can pivot to circular without compromising profit.
What was the moment you knew you wanted to start Fashion Reframe?
It was more of a process than a moment. I left my corporate job in apparel product management a couple of years ago when I moved to Switzerland. I wanted to take a step back and reevaluate what I wanted.
Sustainability has always been important to me, but it was never specifically in my job description despite having worked on projects where social and environmental impact played a role. So I knew I wanted to focus more on this, but I wasn’t sure how. I started diving into different sustainability business practices and took a course with the University of Cambridge on the circular economy.
While I was deep diving, I was also working with a mentor. The convergence of those two elements — mentorship and deepening my knowledge — helped me pinpoint my way forward as a consultant.
Being a product person meant that I was passionate about circular design. I see this as the starting point for transformation in fashion. I decided to leverage my experience in product creation and product marketing to help other brands move towards circularity.
Then I took on my first innovation project on the recommendation of my mentor, which made my decision to set up a consultancy official. I’m still working on the project today. I set up a safe space for a consortium of brands to talk about circular design, where I facilitate productive conversation. Despite them being competitors, they’ve been able to share ideas, learn from each other, and leverage each other's experience. That’s true progress, I think.
What is the definition of “circular” that you work with?
A product or system is circular when you design and plan for the end of life from the beginning. The goal is to design out waste and ensure that the product can be used for a long time. It can also be broken down into parts, so that you can reuse those parts either to make a new one or something entirely different.
For me circularity is also about rethinking ownership. If we rent and share more, we don't need to own all these items, and we don't need to produce as much.
It’s also important to ensure that closing that loop is easy and affordable. The customer is part of the process. The conscious choice has to become the easy and convenient choice, otherwise that loop isn’t likely to be closed.
What is the biggest lesson you learned from working with this linear model that has helped inform your circular work today?
Knowing the people in your supply chain and collaborating with them is so important. As a product manager, I worked closely with design and development to execute the collections. I was part of the whole process — from researching what sold well in previous seasons, listening to customer feedback, and figuring out where the market's going, to visiting factories and negotiating costs.
Image Source: Fashion Reframe
I knew the story of why and how we made the product. All of this showed me how complex the supply chain is and how quickly waste can be created if there’s a communication breakdown.
That’s why I believe it’s so important to get to know your suppliers, know their faces, and know them as people beyond someone on the other end of an email. When you build trust and motivation beyond doing things fast and cheap, you learn from each other, inspire each other, and solve problems together. This is important because circularity is about ensuring a product lasts as long as possible and that you can recapture value at the end of a product’s life.
I have an analogy for this. I'm a Flamenco dancer as a hobby —and flamenco is a conversation: there’s a dancer, singer, guitarist, and a person who keeps rhythm with their hands. It’s a dialogue between the rhythm, the voice, and the movement. They all interact with each other and take cues from each other. Circularity is much like flamenco.
In circular fashion, we have brands, manufacturers, consumers, and recyclers. All these different actors have to work in harmony. For this to happen, you have to be adaptable and transparent. Communication is vital — the strength of that cycle is when you're listening, responding, and co-creating together.
How do you advise business and brand owners to engage with different circularity factors when it comes to figuring out which to prioritize?
You can't necessarily incorporate all the different circular business models into your business — it's a lot. It also doesn't always make sense. It'll depend on your business which loop you prioritize.
I say start with the nature of your product and your customer. Then look at the infrastructure that you have available, or the kind of infrastructure that you can build.
The ideal situation is to keep a product in use as long as possible. This means that designing for durability and easy repair is a good place to start. By starting here, you’re likely to be more thoughtful about the materials you're using, the construction of the seams, and how easy it’s to remove and replace trims.
How do you use product briefs to differentiate your circular product development approach from a linear model?
The product brief is a critical planning step. It precedes the design stage and outlines the customer pain points that you are addressing with your product. It’s the foundation of a successful collection.
Product briefs ensure that your team and suppliers are aligned. It’s essentially a roadmap for designers and developers to help them prioritize. Plus it ensures that your product solves a real need, because you’ve thought about this before beginning the design stage. Circularity starts with a product brief.
When I’m creating a product brief, the first questions I ask are: Does this really need to be made? And why? Who is it for? How much do we need to make? What is the customer willing to pay?
Planning production to meet revenue targets has gotten us into this overproduction and textile waste mess. Of course, you should still have sales goals, but you need to research the actual demand for your product and think about what revenue streams you can tap into outside of selling new products.
The key element of circularity that should be present in a product brief is how you plan for the life of your product after its initial use phase. For example, am I choosing a regenerative and organic or recycled material? Am I using blended fabric or a mono-material? What kind of dyes can I consider? It’s the outline that gets everybody started.
How can businesses ensure that pivoting to circular doesn’t cost them profit?
I'm a product person at heart — I get excited about building new products and bringing new ideas to market. But over my career, I've seen a lot of products made that weren’t needed. Now I like to prioritize systems that keep existing products in use.
Image Source: Fashion Reframe
Circularity doesn’t have to be more expensive. There are parts of it that can be more expensive, because you’ll probably spend more on materials. But in this case, you can also figure out ways to balance costs in your overall business plan.
If you know you're spending more on materials upfront, look into other areas in the other parts of the business where you can share costs. For example, is there a shared repair platform that you can use with other brands so that you don't have to invest in infrastructure?
When it comes to pivoting in a way that adds value instead of costing profits, I like to focus on rental, repair, and resale. Remanufacturing and recycling are part of a circular business framework, but they still require more energy and resources. Whereas rental, repair, and resale still respect the hard work that goes into making a product in the first place.
I believe that adding a circular element to your business model can add value that generates extra revenue. For example, if you launch an in-house resale program, you’re bringing people back to your website, and you're selling preloved garments alongside your new garments.
Adding circularity in a way that doesn’t negatively impact your profits is all about integrating circular business models into your usual customer experience in ways that enhance it.
How do we ensure that the conscious choice is the easiest choice for customers?
We have to stand in their shoes and think about their journey. A lot of brands have spent a lot of time and money on making the customer experience frictionless up to the point of purchase.
But we need to think more about the post-purchase journey: What will encourage them to hold on to it for longer? How can we enable easy repair? How can we encourage, even facilitate, sharing it with others?
For brands making the shift to circular models, how can they influence consumer behavior and teach customers to engage with their products differently?
Sustainability has had a marketing problem for a while — it's all focused on the problem. Focusing on the problem is important to educate on the crisis, but now we're seeing a shift more towards positivity and joy in sustainability communication. What can the future look like if we make the right decision?
I think people want to do the right thing, but they often get overwhelmed with not knowing what is the better choice.
You want to make the right choice, the easy choice, but also the fun choice. Think about offering free repair workshops or swap parties. I think these are good examples, because you’re hosting fun events, offering community, empowering people to fix things on their own, and normalizing the behavior.
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