Circular Signals #07
Ask a circular fashion business why customers hesitate at its prices, and the answer is often straightforward:
“They think we’re expensive.”
But expensive compared to what?
A new garment made from virgin materials and produced at scale?
Or a jacket that has been repaired, a dress that has been relined, or a bag that has been rebuilt from materials that already exist?
Price is part of the conversation.
But we think there is another question underneath it:
How do we actually recognise the value being created by circular work?
We have become very good at measuring what happens when products are made.
What happens after they are made can be harder to see.
Why Circular Fashion Value Is Difficult to Measure
Consider a repair studio.
Ten jackets arrive in one day.
One needs a new zip.
Another needs a structural repair.
Another needs reinforcement in a worn area.
The work is happening, but every intervention is different.
The same is true across circular businesses.
A resale business moves products between owners.
A rental business keeps products moving through repeated uses.
An upcycler works with materials that already exist and gives them another purpose.
A refurbishment business takes products that might otherwise be discarded and makes them usable again.
These activities create value.
But that value isn’t always captured in a way that makes it easy to understand later.
And this matters because circular fashion measurement depends on information.
If we don’t have a clear record of what happened, it becomes much harder to understand the scale, frequency or outcome of the work.
The challenge, then, isn’t simply the cost of measuring circular activity.
It is also whether the information needed to understand that activity is being captured in the first place.
What Value Does Circular Fashion Create?
A circular intervention can create several forms of value at once.
There is the economic value of the service itself: the repair, resale, rental or refurbishment.
There is the material value preserved when an existing product remains useful.
And there can be environmental value associated with keeping products in use and potentially reducing demand for new production or disposal.
But these values don’t automatically become visible to the people making decisions about the business.
A repaired jacket may return to use for several more years.
A resale transaction may give an existing garment another owner.
An upcycled product may make use of material that would otherwise have gone unused.
The activity happens.
The value is created.
But without a clear record of what happened, much of that story becomes difficult to demonstrate.
And this is where we think the valuation gap starts to appear.
The Businesses Closest To The Work Feel It First
This matters particularly for smaller circular fashion businesses.
A large company may have sustainability teams, consultants, reporting systems and dedicated resources for collecting and analysing information.
A small repair studio may have one person doing the repairs, managing customers and running the business.
An independent upcycler or resale business may be doing the same.
That doesn’t mean their work creates less value.
It means the infrastructure around documenting that value can be harder to access.
As more customers, partners, funders and other stakeholders ask businesses to demonstrate what they are doing, that difference becomes increasingly important.
A business can be doing tangible circular work and still struggle to explain it in a way that someone outside the business can understand.
The work exists. The record of the work may not.
Start by Measuring Circular Fashion Activity
So perhaps the answer isn’t to ask circular businesses to produce more reports.
Perhaps we should start closer to where the work actually happens.
A repair is completed.
Record it.
A product is resold.
Record it.
A garment is rented again.
Record it.
Material is recovered and used for something new.
Record it.
The point isn’t to turn every circular action into a complicated reporting exercise.
It is to create a reliable record of what actually happened.
That record can then become useful for much more than reporting.
It can help a business understand its own activity.
It can show patterns over time.
It can support conversations with partners.
It can contribute to funding or investment applications.
And, when appropriate, it can provide the underlying information needed to understand environmental impact.
The calculation comes after the activity.
The activity is what gives the calculation something real to work from.
What Can Circular Fashion Data Tell Us?
Once circular activity is captured consistently, different questions become possible.
How many products were repaired?
What types of repairs are most common?
How often do products return for another intervention?
How long do they remain in use?
How many times do products change hands?
What materials are being recovered or reused?
Which activities are creating value for the business?
These aren’t just reporting questions.
They can tell a business something about the work it is actually doing.
And they can make circular activity easier for someone else to understand.
A potential partner doesn’t just hear that a business is circular.
They can see what it does.
A funder doesn’t just receive a claim about impact.
There is a record behind it.
A customer doesn’t just hear that a product has had another life.
There is a story of what happened along the way.
The Circular Fashion Valuation Gap Goes Beyond Price
The circular fashion industry does have a pricing challenge.
But perhaps the deeper challenge comes before price.
It is the difficulty of making circular value legible.
If a repaired garment cannot be distinguished, through a credible record, from one that simply remained in a wardrobe, its extended life becomes harder to recognise.
If a resale business cannot show what happened to the products it kept in circulation, the activity can become another invisible transaction.
If an upcycler cannot show what materials entered its process and what happened to them afterwards, the finished product tells only part of the story.
In each case, the work exists.
What is missing is the information that allows someone else to understand it.
Building Better Measurement Systems for Circular Fashion
This is where we think circular infrastructure needs to evolve.
Not necessarily by creating smaller versions of systems designed around large-scale production.
But by building systems that reflect how circular fashion businesses actually operate.
Systems that can capture individual interventions.
Systems that can work at the pace of a repair studio, resale business or refurbishment operation.
Systems that make information useful without creating another layer of work for already stretched businesses.
Because the goal shouldn’t be to make circular businesses better at reporting.
It should be to make the value they already create easier to see.
How Can We Make Circular Fashion Value More Visible?
Its value can change when it is repaired, resold, rented, refurbished or kept in use.
But recognising that value requires us to pay attention to what happens after production, not just what happened before it. And that starts with something quite simple: recording what actually happened.
Maybe the next challenge for circular fashion isn’t only creating more value from what already exists.
Maybe it’s building the systems that allow us to see, understand and recognise that value.