Beyond Retro’s Steven Bethell On the Future of Resale

Steven Bethell wears a lot of hats, both figuratively and literally.

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He founded Bank & Vogue with his wife, Helene Carter-Bethell, in the ’90s, working out of their basement in Ottawa in Ontario, Canada, to supply goods to the Salvation Army. Bank & Vogue has since become a giant in the used clothing circuit, spawning the Beyond Retro chain of vintage stores across Europe, plus the Beyond Retro Label and Beyond Remade lines of reconstructed outfits; collaborating with the likes of Converse and Lucy & Yak; providing valuable grist for next-generation fiber producers such as Circulose.

Bethell is also rarely seen without one of his signature chapeaus, including a wide-brimmed, tall-crowned fedora that would bring Pharrell to tears. In this lightly edited conversation, he waxes lyrical about everything from beavers to Elon Musk to the perils of plus-size denim. But he also shares his razor-sharp insights into the future of resale, whether upcycling garments is worth the trouble, the time he almost came to (respectful) blows with Patagonia and where legislation will take the industry next.

Rivet: How did you get involved in the sorting, resale and recycling business?

Steven Bethell: I hate to be that guy, but I just love clothes. I just love them. I don’t know if you’ve ever read the book “Regeneration: Ending the Climate Crisis in One Generation” by Paul Hawken—I highly recommend it—but in it, he talks about keystone species being critical to building ecosystems. For example, when they shot all the wolves in Yellowstone Park, there was species collapse. And in Canada—being the Canadian guy—we have beavers. They go along a river, then they dam it and create a pond. That pond creates all kinds of new forms of life.

And it’s a good analogy for our business at Bank & Vogue. We buy and sell containers of used clothes from 300 charities and private collectors across the United States, and in so doing, we create this ecosystem with new businesses like Beyond Retro and the upcycling work we do, for instance cutting the components and supplying much of the material for Converse’s upcycled Chuck Taylors. And being that beaver, we’re able to do this because we’ve got this scale of used clothes coming through our fingers.

We’re firm believers that the best thing to do is resale, in terms of the value hierarchy. But then the next thing is, can you make something out of something that already exists? You think about how Americans buy 450 million pairs of jeans every year. On average, a garment lives about two-and-a-half years. It’s insane! So, when we get those garments, why can’t we just make something else that didn’t exist? And that’s sort of our premise.

But yeah, how did I get into it? It starts by loving the clothes and it starts by loving the scale of the business. We sell to 30 countries; we have offices in 10 countries around the world and that’s a lot of fun. It might not have been the right answer but there you go.

Rivet: Beyond Remade, your spinoff upcycled brand, is over a year old now. You’ve created a very singular aesthetic, from patchwork denim jackets to recycled suede rucksacks. What was the unique selling proposition behind the concept and how does it mesh with Beyond Retro, which also has its in-house Beyond Retro Label of re-tweaked clothing?

SB: The joy of Beyond Retro is that we’re not only representing the trends through us, but we’re doing it at an accessible price point. Your average price is under 25 pounds ($31). The joy of that is also the problem of it when it comes to upcycling. We created Beyond Remade to demonstrate to brands that we could make a luxury item out of used [clothes]. We wanted to be able to lay that down in front of a brand and say, “Look, you can make something beautiful out of something that already has heritage.” And that moonshot goal of demonstrating this is what gave birth to Beyond Remade.

Beyond Retro and Beyond Remade have different price points but the price points reflect the amount of heavy lifting we did on, for instance, the construction of a jacket, which can take hundreds of hours. The products that we make for the Beyond Retro Label, a lot of it is what we refer to as “nip and tuck.” It’s light touches rather than the heavy lifting of upcycling.

The factory where we do all our work is in Gujarat in northern India. My happy place is working in factories and making product. The fact that we’re doing it and not harming the planet, I think is really important. In fact, we’re regenerating material. And it’s harder to do at scale. It’s one thing to make a jacket. It’s how do you make 1,000 that’s the real trick. It’s a demonstration process to show brands. We have some other component work coming out this spring that demonstrates that.

I believe that the nature of sourcing garments or the materials going into them needs to be a circular one. So yes, the chemical recyclers for polyester are coming. An important message to get out is how do we imagine a low-carbon manufacturing economy? I think a low-carbon manufacturing economy is making things out of things that exist. But are brands buying the material? That’s an honest conversation we need to have. Because clearly, the pioneers are struggling.

Rivet: You’re a partner with the Accelerating Circularity project, supplying much of the materials for its commercial-scale textile-to-textile recycling trials. What have been your biggest learnings about how the industry needs to treat the end-of-life issue?

SB: It’s a bigger question than one would think. There was a panel at the GreenBiz summit in Seattle about how to take advantage of the secondhand boom, and the Patagonia person who leads their resale program said, “Look, we want to prevent things from going to the landfill. We want people to bring their stuff in.” And having been in the space for 25 years, I don’t believe that anybody who, pre-Patagonia’s resale platform, would have thrown their Patagonia jacket in the garbage. And I got up with 1,000 people in the room and said, “I’m not being diminutive to your program, or to your idea that you can make money on resale. But one must be somewhat aware of the consequences of brands like Patagonia taking the pixie dust out of the thrift stores and the Salvation Armys.” All those stores are going to be left with is Shein product and then their economic model will deteriorate.

There’s also a direct correlation between charitable and social enterprises like Goodwill and the Salvation Army and the help they give. The Salvation Army hands out sandwiches and socks; Goodwill helps get people back into the job community. I just challenged the panel in a very sincere way. What are you doing with an existing ecosystem?

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So, there’s one conversation about resale as the first step in the circularity journey. The other is are brands willing to pay that green premium to recycle clothes that can’t be resold? We need fancy computers to be able to sort; we need Elon Musk to get into sorting. The work that Accelerating Circularity and all those people have demonstrated is that there’s a path to do that and certainly Renewcell’s demonstrated a path. My experience in this space so far is that the brands seem to have made public-facing promises, but the purchasing department and the merchandisers are not on the same page.

Rivet: With promoting circularity, where do you see the biggest gaps? Is it technological? Will?

SB: Technology’s not a barrier because [Circulose]’s doing it. Sorting’s not a barrier because I’m sorting for Renewcell at scale. The biggest gap is demand. My hobby—everyone has a weird hobby—is I have a regenerative farm. I have 200 acres; I’ve got 20,000 apple trees. But the first rule about farming is you need a customer. You can grow all the food you want but if no one’s going to buy your food, it’s just going to go to waste.

There are forward-thinking brands like Converse that say, “We need to figure this out because it’s going to end up there.” For those fast fashion guys who are trying to make their quarterly shareholders meeting as brief as possible, the only way you’re going to get them to do it is by legislating.

And legislation needs to say it’s not pre-consumer waste. We’re not going to sweep up the shit on the factory floor, put it back in the machine and call that recycling. They must own parts of the value chain taking the material after it’s gone through all of the resale options.

Rivet: Why do you focus on denim?

SB: There’s a rule in our world. Anyone can sell gold. It’s the guy who can sell the garbage who’s going to make money. Other cellulose-rich products like T-shirts, sweatshirts and towels, have an active wiper market. You can sell them for cleaning cloths and rags. But denim, after it’s gone through the resale options, you can’t use it as a cleaning cloth. We focus on denim because the afterlife options for denim are really limited.

And brace yourself, I’m going to make fun of Americans now. If we try to resell a pair of jeans in America and it doesn’t resell, it gets baled up and then it goes to a sorting plant where it’s sorted for reuse for the world market. The problem with Americans is that a lot of them are plus size, so a 38-, 40-, 42-inch-waist jean has a really limited world market. Denim is one of the lowest-hanging fruits: it’s cellulose-rich and has a lot of weight to it, but the resale market is limited, particularly for the oversized items.

We don’t sort clothes based only on condition. We sort based on fashion. For example, you can’t sell skinny jeans in a lot of reuse markets. They won’t buy them because who’s going to wear a pair of skinny jeans when it’s 100 degrees out? We sort for size. It’s learning about relevance: relevant shape, relevant size, relevant condition but also relevant style.

Rivet: Where do you see the used clothing business going next?

SB: I genuinely believe that this is the zeitgeist moment in the used clothing business—not necessarily resale because that’s been around a long time, but the idea that used can be an input to new is an epic moment for the industry in its totality.

But this great opportunity, as an industry, comes with an enormous responsibility, and there are things [missing] in our trade, like transparency as an example, because as an industry have really operated in the dark.

At Bank & Vogue, we brought in a consultant who looked at our practices, including how we audit our suppliers for human rights compliance. He also brought in Emitwise to do a carbon analysis of our business because it’s one thing to say used is much better for the environment…let’s assume it’s 80 percent better, but we are still consuming 20 percent carbon over new sales. So we wanted to lay out what would a science-based target looks like for Bank & Vogue.

If I want to play on a tennis court against new virgin material manufacturers, I want to make claims that we are better. I also want to make the claim that we are not only better, but we’re also doing it at a level where we are a leader in transparency on human rights, on science-based targets on carbon. I think if you’re going to be in this space and you want to push the boundaries, you’ve got to push yourself as well.

This article was previously published in Rivet magazine .

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