Lessons From Worn Wear: How to Build a Financially & Environmentally Sustainable Circularity Program
With Nellie Cohen
Interview by Stella Hertantyo
Nellie Cohen spent nearly a decade at Patagonia as the architect of the brand’s precedent-setting and award-winning circularity program, Worn Wear. She holds over 15 years of sustainability experience and is widely recognized as a leading figure within the circular economy movement.
Under Nellie’s leadership, Patagonia’s Worn Wear was expanded globally to Europe, Asia-Pacific, and Latin America within two years. She helped build a recommerce business for used Patagonia gear in partnership with Trove with over $1 million in annual sales.
In 2019, she founded her consultancy — Baleen — which is a specialized agency that focuses on circularity design and implementation. Over her career, she has worked with some of the world’s best-known brands including Levi’s, Target, lululemon, and DÔEN.
I interviewed Nellie in the Conscious Fashion Collective Membership about:
What jobs are becoming more prevalent in the circular economy space,
How to build a commercially successful circular business model,
And how to understand consumer behavior to ensure that circular business models are successful.
Below are some of the highlights from the conversation. Inside our membership, you'll find the full recording with more insights from Nellie (plus unlock our entire session library and resource hub, attend our live events, and connect with a values-aligned community).
What is the biggest lesson you have learned about what it takes to build a commercially successful circular business model?
When we built Worn Wear, there wasn’t anything else like it in the industry. In many ways, Patagonia builds blueprints for the apparel industry, which is an influential role to have.
When we were thinking about Worn Wear, we had a lot of thought partnership and support from the Eileen Fisher team. At the time, their resale program was called Green Eileen and now it’s called Renewed. We couldn’t have launched Worn Wear without the advice we received from them.
They had a different perspective on how they were thinking about their circularity program. At the time, the revenue they were generating from their resale program was being put back into programs to benefit women and girls in their local communities. It was a philanthropic approach to circularity.
We loved the philanthropic angle, but we wanted to try a different take. We wanted to prove that a circular business model — based on reselling clothing — could be commercially successful and profitable.
Three or four years after Worn Wear launched, I was caught off guard by the rise of peer-to-peer resale, which is a different approach entirely. In this version of resale, customers transact their items with one another. Peer-to-peer resale has benefits, especially for smaller brands with more limited logistics and operations bandwidth. The brand is facilitating and encouraging a transaction, but is often not generating much revenue in this resale model.
This lies in contrast to a program like Worn Wear where the brand is purchasing back the garments from the customer, evaluating, refurbishing, and then reselling. You design the unit economics to be profitable in that way.
Because I come from Patagonia and see circularity as a way to help brands become more sustainable, I believe that these programs need to be commercially viable.
You can measure circularity in a million ways and there are so many metrics out there. But, at the end of the day, it’s your profit and loss. You have to ask: Is this program making money so that the brand or organization isn’t driving revenue from a purely linear, business-as-usual model?
While being 100% circular isn’t our current reality, we need to work towards a growing portion of our revenue pie being derived from circular resources.
To make a program profitable, you have to start with your customer. You have to understand how your customer interacts with your brand. Then you have to understand your product design and how ready it is for circularity.
There’s no one-size-fits-all. Your circularity program needs to be tailored to your customers and mitigate the challenges that they have.
Are there specific kinds of jobs that you have noticed becoming more prevalent in the circular economy space?
I’m seeing the word “circular” in an increasing number of job titles, which is exciting. I think we have a long way to go when it comes to figuring out where circularity sits in organizations.
When you are building a business — regardless of whether it’s a sustainable business or not — you are looking for people with marketing backgrounds, logistics, operations, brand design, and other skills integral to a thriving business.
What’s also interesting is that circularity isn’t a core skill set that all sustainability professionals have. This means that for organizations building a circularity program, it’s a micro business within a business.
This is exciting, because it means that anybody with those core “traditional” skill sets could conceivably work on or lead a circular business model within their organization.
The circularity benefits are derived from a commercially viable program. So you want someone who can grow with the program. In this way, it’s more of a level playing field than a traditional sustainability or corporate responsibility type role within an organization.
You’ve said that the most important element of the circular economy is finding ways to circulate products at their highest value for as long as possible. How do you implement this?
This has always been a question of durability and aesthetics. One of my favorite programs I’ve ever worked on was with the California-based brand, DÔEN. The quality of their garments, the timelessness of their style, and their approach to understanding their customers enabled a robust resale model.
You need to create garments that are sought after season after season. Levi’s is another brand I’ve worked with which has always been the hallmark of denim. We’re in an era where people are embracing many different styles of denim — this is a trend that favors circularity. I predict that this will result in an uptick in denim resale in 2025.
Another interesting brand I worked with was Vivobarefoot. People were hesitant about footwear resale. But their products are super durable and they found a way to sanitize and clean them. Now their resale program is doing well.
How do you suggest brands navigate the additional logistics that come with circular business models while making sure it still makes business sense?
What I remind clients to dispel this anxiety is that even when we’re not running a circularity program, creating a new garment often requires global logistics. We source materials from across the world, we produce in factories, we get the products into packaging and make sure it arrives at a shipping dock on a specific date — and then we ship our garments globally.
If we’ve figured a global supply chain out, we can figure out a domestic circularity supply chain — it’s not impossible.
Pictures Credits: Nellie Cohen’s LinkedIn
Outsourcing circular logistics can be expensive, so do as much as you can in-house. For example, with DÔEN, they bought a washing machine and did all of the washing and drying in-house. We did the same at Patagonia.
Especially when you are starting a program, doing logistics in-house makes it feel less daunting and saves you money. That’s what I always advise.
What was your approach to consumer behavior that ensured that Worn Wear was as successful as it was when you were at Patagonia?
We started our circularity program by focussing on our most durable — and consequently our most expensive — items. This included alpine gear, down jackets, and rain jackets. What we noticed was that people were excited to be able to buy a used jacket that was in good condition.
That’s when we started testing if they’d be interested in buying pre-loved versions of other products. At some point, we tried selling used board shorts and there was huge interest! You need to be willing to trial aspects of your circularity program and get to know your audience.
When I worked for Ergobaby, which is a baby carrier company, we started the first brand-owned resale program for baby gear. One of the biggest concerns was: How do we create customer confidence?
So we turned to the automotive industry and looked at how luxury car companies market and communicate their pre-owned luxury vehicles. We noticed that they market their inspections, they make guarantees, and offer returns. We took some of those learnings and applied them to the communications and backend processes of Ergo Baby.
This included importing the same load-bearing equipment that they use in their production factory, so that we could test the pre-owned carriers and make sure that they were still passing the load-bearing test before being resold.
Of course, you can buy an Ergobaby carrier on Facebook Marketplace, but it hasn’t gone through the same inspection and certification that the one from the brand has. That is an example of how we built trust with customers.
Where do you suggest brands and businesses begin when it comes to figuring out if adding a circular business model reduces their impact or not?
Resale models have become popular in the apparel space. Whenever something becomes very popular very quickly, we need to look at it with a critical lens and question its true impact.
I believe that financial revenue from circularity is the greatest marker of impact, because it means that brands can limit their production of garments from virgin materials.
The elephant in the room is that if you have a circularity program, but you are producing more and more new garments each year, then you are not creating true impact. It’s the same as when a brand uses a more sustainable material in a product, but then makes ten times more of that product. It may sound good in marketing, but it hasn’t moved the sustainability needle forward in any way.
The truth is that it will probably take some sort of supply chain disruption for brands to adopt circularity programs in any real way. If the cotton fields flood, we’ll be forced to try something different. When business as usual is no longer possible, we will turn to alternatives and find ways to make them work.
What is the role of consumer education in circular fashion? How can a new brand strategically develop a guaranteed buy-back price from their first collection? What are tips for communicating the value of circularity? What is your advice for how to pivot into the circular fashion space from a more traditional career path?
To hear from Nellie on these topics and much more, watch the full recording in the Conscious Fashion Collective Membership!