CIRCULAR SYSTEMS
The linear fashion system is broken. Make, take, waste. Repeat. It’s depleting resources, filling landfills, and pretending recycling will save us. This pillar is about breaking that cycle and building the infrastructure for real circularity.
Real circularity isn’t a marketing campaign. It’s designing clothes that can be repaired, resold, and actually recycled. It’s building take-back systems that work, not ones that ship donations overseas to be dumped. It’s infrastructure, not buzzwords on a hang tag.
Through repair services, resale platforms, and take-back systems, we’re changing how people interact with our products and building pathways that keep garments in use longer. We don’t have all the answers, but we’re not waiting for perfect solutions. Products for a circular system. Products that return. Products which break-up with the linear model.
2025 SNAPSHOT
in-store in-real-life repair activations
repair orders through Mended
customer rating for repair service
second hand items sent in
of our consumers engaged with our circular systems
OUR GOALS
Our aim is to become a fully circular business, keeping our products in play for as long as possible, through repair, resell and recycle. We track this through one long-term Moonshot vision, with clear measurable targets from 2025-2027. Here is our status in 2025.
04 BUILDING CIRCULAR SYSTEMS
Our vision is to be a fully circular business keeping 100% of our products in a closed loop
THE WORK BEHIND OUR IMPACT
Read on to explore the strategies, projects and partnerships behind our progress.
A circular cycle in action.
From design to production to repair, resell, and recycle; it’s keeping clothes in play rather than thrown away.
REPAIR
LOVE IT FOR LONGER – OUR PARTNERSHIP WITH MENDED
Every year, more than 90 million tons of clothing end up as waste. Together with MENDED, an online repair and alterations service, we’re working to change that. 2025 marked an elevation in our partnership, with in-store activations and more. Since we launched, we’ve kept over 2,500 pieces in circulation.
Bringing Repair to Our Store
The launch of our new store allowed us to bring repair into real life.
In September, we hosted our first event during our DetoxDenim campaign with 30 pre-bookable repair slots for Changemakers. Seamstresses repaired jeans (not just ARMEDANGELS, but any brand, because every repaired product is better than a new purchase), handled hemming and alterations, and offered embroidery to personalize pieces. All slots were fully booked within 10 minutes.
In December, we hosted a second event during our Christmas campaign. This time, we focused on embroidery as an alternative to traditional gift shopping — personal instead of interchangeable, appreciative rather than consumption-driven. Our Impact and Innovation Director Julia and MENDED CEO Agnes introduced the event, explaining the motivation behind the partnership and repair’s role in circularity. All 30 slots booked within one hour. Customers personalized existing favorite pieces and created meaningful gifts, complemented by coffee and snacks from local partner Van Dyck.
What We Learned
Repair is a clearly articulated customer demand, and it works seamlessly in a store environment. When we explain circularity, let people experience it, and create space for reflection together, it resonates — even during peak sales periods.
Raising Awareness
We ran campaigns throughout the year to remind people repair is an option, including golden ticket promos where winners received weekend getaways. Greta (Senior CRM Manager) and Agnes also presented our partnership at NewCom (Digital Marketing Summit), proving repair is a win-win for environment, consumers, and brands.
We are excited about the opportunities to elevate the partnership even more in 2026.
“Together with ARMEDANGELS, we’ve shown what’s possible when repair becomes a real alternative for customers. From in-store activations to social content, events and press, we approached repair from a full 360-degree perspective. To date, we’ve fixed and fitted 2,596 ARMEDANGELS items, with repair activations consistently fully booked and a 4.9-star customer rating showing how much customers enjoy keeping their favourite pieces longer.
Beyond direct impact, this collaboration was featured in leading business publications such as W&V and Manager Magazin, which put repair in a new light across the industry and proved that it doesn’t have to be dusty, but can be genuinely desirable”
Agnes Weber, Co-founder MENDED
HOW MENDED WORKS
Choose Your Alteration
Choose your personal alteration request step by step, from sewing on belt loops to shortening hems.
Ship With Ease
You will receive a QR code for shipping from your DHL location. You do not need a printer!
Expertly Repaired
In MENDED’s local workshops, your piece is handcrafted – preferably using original spare parts.
Back Within 10 Days
You’ll receive your item back within a maximum of 10 days. Still not perfect? MENDED offers a 30-day satisfaction guarantee.
OUR RESELL PLATFORM
In 2025, we continued our partnership with Trove (formerly reverse.supply), a recommerce platform that runs the entire resale process for us. Trove handles the logistics from start to finish: taking back worn garments from customers, sorting them, photographing them, and listing them directly in our online shop. Customers can buy secondhand and B-choice items seamlessly alongside new products—all authentic, checked, and quality-controlled.
Throughout 2025, we worked with Trove to improve the user experience and make resale feel more integrated:
- Content and navigation updates: Revised all content pages with updated information and added navigation buttons for easier browsing.
- Product recommendations: Added recommendations on product detail pages to help customers discover similar secondhand pieces.
- Transparency improvements: Made model measurements visible on product pages, even for items shown with pack shots only, helping customers make confident purchases.
- Portal adjustments: Updated the reverse portal to streamline the take-back process for customers returning items.
These improvements make it easier for customers to choose resale, keeping more garments in circulation and extending product lifespans beyond their first owner.
LOGISTICS FOR CIRCULARITY
2025 was a year of switching things up, and this also applied to our logistics. We transitioned to a new partner — Hermes Sonnefeld — whose capacity, values, and capabilities align with where we are headed.
The partnership directly supports our circular ambitions. Previously, our Re-Loved store offered both secondhand and B-quality stock — a practical way to give imperfect items a home rather than writing them off. Hermes’s ability to restore B-quality stock to A-quality standard means the Re-Loved store can now focus more on genuine secondhand pieces. The scale and technical capability of the site — processing 30 million items annually — also gives us the infrastructure to grow our take-back programs.
The site runs entirely on green electricity through an on-site photovoltaic system, and passed certification audit across GOTS, GRS, OCS, RCS, RAS, RMS and RWS with zero findings.
This is logistics as an enabler of circularity, not just a fulfilment operation.