In 2020, we spent most of our time at home and got a chance to ponder over important things in life. Like, “Should I learn how to bake that banana bread?” or “Is this Earth’s way of healing itself?” or “When are malls going to reopen again so as I can spend my last paycheque?”.
Now, bar one, they are no longer that important. As we count the last few days of 2021, we see that the past two years have changed our lives in unprecedented ways, and for many people, it got them to at least ask the right questions. Especially when it came to necessities and luxuries.
As much as we wanted to get out of the house and wander around a mall again to return home with a new t-shirt, did we need a new t-shirt?
Retail — online or offline — is a massive industry the world over and runs by the very simple logic of demand and supply. If there is a market for it, it is going to sell. And this ‘it’ can be absolutely anything. While this space generates trillions and more yearly, it also generates employment opportunities and helps economies, of course, but there are some scary downsides of this. The amount of waste it generates.
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With most people simply throwing away old products without taking care of the right way to recycle or upcycle them, the amount of waste humans generate grows every year.
According to World Bank data, the world generates about 2.01 billion tonnes of municipal solid waste annually, with at least 33 per cent of that not managed in an environmentally safe manner. “Worldwide, waste generated per person per day averages 0.74 kilogram but ranges widely, from 0.11 to 4.54 kilograms”, and looking forward to 2050, global waste is expected to grow to 3.40 billion tonnes per year.
Disposing off waste in an environmentally safe manner and recycling are the only ways forward in most cases, but there are some other small, but significant, ways how this issue can be solved - reusing and upcycling.
Reusing a product increases its life cycle and thus delays the chances of it being dumped in the trash. Sure, your two-year-old 32-inch TV might seem too small now, but it would be the perfect fit for someone else’s house. And upcycling gives old products a whole new lease of life allowing them to last longer and get used better.
Reusing products might sound strange for gadgets and devices, but it is happening. Companies like Rentomojo, Furlenco lease out household devices like refrigerators, smart TVs, air conditioners, washing machines, etc, across cities in India, and their primary clients are young professionals.
With jobs that might need them to shift cities often, most people who rent out products from companies like these find it convenient. It is easier, in most cases, to just rent furniture and some household gadgets instead of buying them and lugging them around from place to place. If you add the subscription fee one pays every month and compare it to the EMI one might be paying to buy these products new, the math doesn’t work out.
In the long run, it does make more sense to buy them, but the convenience that the likes of Rentomojo and Furlenco offer, trumps that. And this is something many people have been actively looking into since the pandemic started since the spending power fell for many.
Rentomojo entered eight new cities over the past 18 months and currently function in 16 cities across the country. Founder and CEO of Rentomojo, Geetansh Bamania, told Business Today that many of these new cities turned profitable for the company within the first six months of operations. “Despite this pandemic and disruption, we have been able to increase revenues at a time when many industries saw a 70-80 per cent dip in revenues and also turned PAT (profit after tax) profitable in Oct 2021.”
Bamania explained that ever since the first wave of COVID-19 which witnessed massive job losses and salary cuts across industries, people started delaying their purchase plans for most products.
“We’ve heard of stories where people were buying products and then during the lockdown when they had to move back to their hometowns, they had to figure out a place to store these products in warehouses and this cost them anything between Rs 10,000 to Rs 13,000. In many cases, this cost was equal to the purchase cost of the products,” he said.
“This is when people realised the flexibility rental offers. The option of closing the subscription whenever they want was priceless and this is what drove a huge demand post the first lockdown. We did see new categories emerging as well over this time, like the demand for WFH devices and fitness equipment, etc, but other categories continued to grow as well,” Bamania said.
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“Since we saw growth despite the fact that a lot of people went back to their hometowns and closed subscriptions it indicates that there is a new set of customers who have started to see value in the rental ecosystem. The surge in the demand was such that we were able to cater to only 10-15 per cent of the requests we are getting from the market,” he said.
For a service like Rentomojo, working professionals are the ones who have been most open to their services.
“While initially, people who just started their jobs were the core customers, we are seeing this being taken up by people who understand that any depreciating asset should be taken on rent. The biggest shift we are seeing is where people have started to see the impact the circular economy has on the planet, and are choosing rental over buying,” Bamania said.
Why rent when you can buy (for less)?
Parallel to the rental market, there is another market that also helps towards some of the sustainability goals that the planet desperately needs - the second-hand and refurbished market.
Xtracover is a site that sells refurbished smartphones and laptops and also retail display units of devices that are almost brand new. The company started operations towards the end of 2019 but 2020 was pretty much a wipe out for them since their products on offer fell in the “non-essentials category”.
But this gave Xtracover some more time to rework their strategy and as people dived into working from home, they witnessed a spike in sales in 2021.
“People have started to trust refurbished products more after the pandemic. The reasons could be said to include cost-effectiveness and a growing trust in brands offering refurbished products as slowly and gradually the move happens from an unorganised market to a more organised and more structured one,” said Soumitra Gupta, CEO of Xtracover.
“From reduced costs to being eco-friendly, there are multiple benefits of using refurbished electronic products. Consumers are gradually understanding the importance of the refurbished industry, and the entry of more organized players in the industry is further making it easier for them to access high-quality and tested products in the market. Valued at $10 billion with the consumer demand continuing to rise, the refurbished market certainly cannot be ignored, and it may just be the future of consumer tech,” Guha added.
The second-hand market is not just for devices though, it applies to other products like clothes and shoes as well. And this is a market that thrived immensely over the pandemic, thanks to Instagram.
Thrift stores are very common in the west, but it is a concept that India is just starting to warm up to. Over 2020 and 2021, Instagram got inundated with thrift stores selling pretty much everything from jewellery to clothes, and even shoes, and some of the products on offer are not pre-loved. Many of them are new (with tags), often bought in bulk, they could also be factory seconds or export surplus goods.
Of course, at a time when brick-and-mortar retail outlets were shut across the globe, shopping was mainly happening online across websites and shopping apps. These thrift stores cashed into the amount of time people were spending online, and the fact that they weren’t stepping out to shop, to make the best of their business.
The modus operandi was simple when things started - post photos of the products with the right aesthetics, post the measurements, potential defects (if it is pre-loved), and price in the caption (or ask people to DM for price) - and that’s it. Interested people respond with “Book” or “PP” (price please, if the price is not mentioned). The conversation then moves to DMs where cash transaction details are shared by the seller, payments are made via UPI, then the product gets couriered straight to your home.
Some of these thrift stores have also held auctions for branded items that takes place via the comments below the post. Most of them also alert their followers about what products they are “dropping” next via Reels and Stories. Some of these accounts now have thousands of followers and very often the products they are drop get booked and bought in minutes.
One such thrift store that has managed to move ahead of Instagram to create a studio space for themselves while also participating in pop-ups across Delhi NCR is Aimee. Run by Vaibhavi Javalkar and Akshay Tambe, Aimee loved and its sister handle, the3digitstore, is not just about thrifting.
Aimee believes in curating vintage pieces for their collection and upcycling some pieces, both online and offline, rather than selling in bulk, and the products they have on offer are very often from brands like Calvin Klien, Balenciaga, etc. Tambe and Javalkar’s thrift adventure started from a backpackers’ hostel they ran before COVID-19 shut it down.
“We used to have a table in the hostel where people just used to leave things that had no use for any further. Then someone else would come and pick it up and leave something else in its place. Very often these items were clothes. One of the days I just took some of these clothes, put them on hangers, photographed them and put them on Instagram. And people bought them!” Tambe, who is also a professional photographer, said.
For Javalkar and Tambe it was astonishing that people were willing to pay for something on Instagram. What got them more excited was the kind of response they got. Their account currently has 11.8k followers and their products have been used by stylists for actors like Anushka Sharma and Jacqueline Fernandes.
“We are often asked where we source our stuff from. We can’t obviously share that but it is incredible that people are excited about us and are buying into the aesthetic. It’s not just clothes for us anymore,” Javalkar said.
Sustainability and being able to give old clothes a fresh lease of life is definitely what drives people like Javalkar and Tambe, but with so many thrift stores online, the chances of another waste market being created are dangerously high.
Priyanjoli Basu, designer and co-founder of Oh Scrap Madras, says that it is too early to determine whether these Instagram thrift stores will manage to have a positive impact on the amount of waste created. Her company Oh Scrap Madras recycles textile waste to create products like Christmas decorations, brooches, hair clips, etc.
“The concept of pre-loved clothes is not new, at least for most of us growing up in smaller cities. Think of the saris that are passed on from women to women across generations, the winter clothes we wore as kids being packed away for our younger siblings or cousins… some of us have been doing this for years,” Basu said.
“With big designers talking about sustainability now and bringing that belief into the textiles they are using has gotten people interested in sustainable fabrics now. But not everyone can afford these, they are expensive. The next best thing in a situation like this, where we are actively trying to reduce the amount we waste, is thrifting,” she pointed out.
Basu mentioned the incident that occurred in Bangladesh in 2013. An eight-storey building collapsed on April 24, 2013, which housed a garment factory amongst other offices, apartments, and even a bank. While the shops and the bank on the lower floors were closed off the very moment cracks were spotted on the building, the garment factory workers were ordered to return. This incident is considered to be one of the “deadliest non-deliberate structural failure accidents in modern human history and the deadliest garment factory disaster in history” with 1,134 deaths.
The garment factory manufactured clothes for brands like Benetton, Prada, Gucci, Versace, Moncler, Mango, Primark, and Walmart. While some of these are big names, others are primarily fast-fashion brands.
This incident, along with multiple allegations against brands like H&M not paying their factory workers fair wages and making them work in inhuman conditions has brought in ample criticism against the fast-fashion industry. A 2018 Reuters report quotes an H&M spokesperson saying that "there is no universally agreed level for living wages" and that wage levels should be defined by the labour market through "fair negotiations" between employers and workers and not by western brands. This, and many other cases, led to some of the more conscious individuals abandoning fast-fashion brands and choosing to invest in more ethical and sustainable ones.
But as Basu rightly said, big brands and sustainable clothing is not cheap. Thrifting acts as the perfect solution here. It gives people the chance to buy something very expensive for a fraction of the price, and it also helps give old clothes a fresh run.
“A lot of thrifting, shopping for vintage products is aspirational. Many young kids cannot afford to splurge on clothes so this is a great solution for them. But both the sellers and the consumers need to be mindful about the whole process,” Basu said.
While it is great that some people have taken it upon themselves to give clothes, shoes, etc, a second life, they also have to take care of what happens once these become unusable, Basu points out. The business of thrifting cannot just be about sending products out into the world and not bothering about the correct disposal or recycling, or even upcycling, at the end of it. “The cycle must be completed,” she said.
“Also, people need to be mindful about how much they are buying. If you are buying a couple of products from a select thrift stores, then it is fine. But if you are making multiple purchases then you are just being greedy and irresponsible. How is that any different from buying fast-fashion then?” Basu added.
Second-hand goods reduce the creation of solid waste for only a fraction of the time if one considers the overall impact on the planet. From e-waste to fabric waste, the only sustainable solution is recycling. But for now, at least some things have been sent out to the world to serve some purpose.
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