Return to Vendor Wants Textile Circularity at Scale Now, Not Later
Return to Vendor just might be the most innovative circular textile startup you’ve never heard of.
That’s because the New York-based company, which grew out of co-founder Adam Baruchowitz’s two-decade sojourn with clothing reuse and recycling firm Wearable Collections, has been in stealth mode for the past three years. Now that it’s ready to move products into the marketplace—it’s rolling out a capsule collection with five collaborators this month—Return to Vendor is no longer shying away from the spotlight. In fact, it welcomes it.
More from Sourcing Journal
The problem with textile collection is that only 50 percent is reusable, Baruchowitz said from his office on a tree-lined avenue in Midtown Manhattan, a little past the Westside Theater where an off-Broadway revival of “Little Shop of Horrors” is in its fifth season. And the more the industry tries to extract value from that first half—much like a certain man-eating plant with its increasingly insatiable appetite—the more it leaves behind the “stuff that’s difficult to handle.” It’s the dregs of the take-back bins, which are replete with blended, trim-festooned fabrics that are not worth the cost of deconstruction that Baruchowitz—and now Return to Vendor—is obsessed with.
“There’s a lot of innovation that’s trying to separate polyester from cotton,” he said. “But are any of them at scale now?”
A serendipitous conversation with Gangadhar Jogikalmath, a protein chemist who was researching monomaterials at the time, made things click. The reason why most companies struggle with circularity, Jogikalmath said on a Zoom feed from Boston, is that they lack scale—and the materials. Getting “circularity at scale now,” rather than a nebulous near-future, as Baruchowitz desired, would require taking an existing feedstock, preferably one that’s already considered waste, and tweaking it chemically and physically to behave in ways it’s not meant to. By doing this, a garment made from a single material could be broken down to be remade into something new. Think Lego bricks that can be transformed into a unicorn castle or space pirate ship and then returned to individual bits of plastic, but on a molecular level.
“From one waste comes many, but then when you recycle it, it goes back to one,” said fashion designer William Calvert, who has worked for the likes of Diane von Furstenberg and Pierre Balmain and now serves as Return to Vendor’s CEO and creative director. “You’re replacing texture profiles, performance profiles, all from one monomaterial.” He gestured to the office walls, which were decked out with a vast array of samples: canvas fabric, cotton-like shirting, terrycloth, sports mesh, elastic, lingerie lace, outerwear fill, buttons, zippers, threads. They were all made from the same thing.
That thing was nylon, specifically nylon-6 from discarded fishing nets and castoff carpet. Protein and nylon molecules are remarkably similar, said Jogikalmath. The trick is getting a monomaterial to behave like a blend, which he is able to do by using green—and very proprietary—chemistry that disrupts the bonds between molecules and tunes their degree of “slipperiness” so that functions like stretch and recovery can happen. Baruchowitz described Jogikalmath’s technology as “indistinguishable from magic.”
‘Feed me, Seymour‘
Monomaterials in fashion aren’t a new idea. Adidas, through its “Made to be Remade” initiative, dabbled in the idea of making shoes and jackets from recycled polyester that could be reverted into feedstock without the need for disassembly or sorting. On has a monomaterial running shoe, made out of what it calls Cyclon, that is similarly “designed to be recycled.” Salomon’s Index.01 comprises two materials, attached with water-based glue: a recycled polyester upper that can be returned to yarn and a nitrogen-infused thermoplastic polyurethane-based foam sole that can be ground up and added to the construction of new ski boots. Even so, the brands have been fairly limited in what they’ve been able to make, requiring creative workarounds. For its anorak, for instance, Adidas cinched sleeves with fabric sashes instead of elastic or drawcords. It included no velcro or zippers because they didn’t exist in the same monomaterial form.
Other companies have regenerated the nylon in damaged fishing nets, too, most notably Aquafil, whose Econyl material has found its way into high-end products by Burberry and Prada. But Econyl must be blended with other fibers to get a certain hand or performance, Calvert said.
“We thank them for laying out the red carpet,” he said. “We’re taking it all the way, so we’re not half a circle. We’re full-circle closed loop.”
Return to Vendor’s ability to recreate the performance of spandex—the bane of textile recyclers everywhere because it gums up machines—has been a revelation in itself because it means disrupting the world of stretch, which “runs into hundreds of billions of dollars worldwide,” Jogikalmath said. Lululemon, to give an example, built an empire on the back of nylon and spandex. He asked: What if the athleisure-wear purveyor reduced that to one single material and made it recyclable?
The thought is an attractive one for an industry that has been wrestling with how to manage its ballooning waste in the wake of increasing extended producer responsibility legislation that could come with hefty financial penalties for non-compliance. “That’s what led us to pitch to one of the best VCs in town and get seed round funding within like 10 minutes, right?” Jogikalmath said. “I’ve never raised money that quickly.” Return to Vendor is backed by Khosla Ventures, a California-based venture capital firm whose portfolio also includes Affirm, DoorDash and Instacart.
And stealth mode didn’t mean the startup stayed out of sight. It occasionally popped up in unexpected places, such as when it collaborated with Golf Wang, the streetwear brand founded by music mogul Tyler, the Creator, to make the Artemis I mission jackets that NASA’s broadcast team wore in 2022. There have been behind-the-scenes videos on Instagram and the occasional podcast appearance. Return to Vendor has also been quietly having conversations with the people who make the important decisions, resulting in multiple joint development agreements with brands that, as Baruchowitz put it, would “make you go, ‘Oh wow.” Following the company’s “Nylism” campaign, which features limited-edition drops designed by the likes of AnyBag, Daryl K and Maurizio Dona, small brands will start launching lines made with the so-called “RTV nylon” in 2025, followed by larger ones in 2026.
From many, back to one
The trio form a kind of gestalt that can only function as a whole: Baruchowitz with his expertise in reverse logistics, Jogikalmath with his prowess in materials science and Calvert with his commercial experience and eye for design. At one investor meeting, a woman walked in and said she heard that there was a scientist, a fashion designer and a recycler, so who was whom?
“And we quickly looked at her and said, ‘You can’t tell?’” Calvert said.
The company has been testing and re-testing its technology with the help of 40 mills across the United States, Europe and Asia. The idea, Calvert said, is not to operate its own facility but to utilize a “toll model” wherein Return to Vendor owns the recipes but taps into preexisting capacity and expertise in a more or less drop-in format. The only change for filament makers and injection molders would be the addition of a hopper that can dispense the chemistry into an existing extruder. The process generates no toxic byproducts, such as the 1,4-dioxane that polyester production can create, Jogikalmath said. Nor will it have to jostle with another industry for access to feedstock. Unlike recycled polyester, which, for the most part, relies on plastic bottles that are better off being reincarnated into plastic bottles, nylon that enters the oceans in the form of a billion pounds of damaged nets every year is an abundant resource with few takers.
How Return to Vendor will handle returns, on the other hand, is still being mapped out beyond the use of a state-of-the-art spectrometer at one of Wearable Collections’ sorting partners in New Jersey to identify RTV nylon. There are plenty of options still being explored, from partnering with third-party returns centers to encouraging in-store collections to establishing regional hubs, Baruchowitz said. The company could implement a digital product passport that includes a QR code or figure out a way to incorporate AI. There may be no one-size-fits-all solution, which is why Return to Vendor isn’t “putting all our eggs in one basket,” he added. And if there’s a relationship with, say, a network of hospitals for scrubs, that’s already a closed loop that can be easily customized.
“The slow drip of what’s coming back, we’re able to handle now,” Calvert said. “In terms of the scale of sorting, we’re already at a couple of million pounds per month that we can handle. So there’s no question about scale. It’s just getting some of this tech online in time for when big brands launch.”
Another challenge is convincing everyone that recycled nylon can give recycled polyester a run for its money—literally, even—by allowing what Jogikalmath describes as “designing for the end of life from the beginning.”
“It’s almost impossible to beat the pricing of polyester,” he said. “[Conventional] nylon is already more expensive. So part of the challenge is to convert people who use polyester to using nylon [and convincing them that] switching at scale would bring them to almost cost parity.”
There’s also the fact that fashion moves at a glacial pace when it comes to change even when the global economy isn’t touch and go. Industry can be slower to catch up to trends than you want it to, Baruchowitz said. For now, Return to Vendor is trying to chart a way forward, and that begins with showing the world what it thinks textile circularity should look like. Eventually, however, it wants to replicate the concept with other waste streams. Nylon is just “scratching the surface,” he said.
“What we always say is we’re reverse engineering how apparel should be made—thinking about the end of use at the beginning phase,” Baruchowitz said. “That to us is the definition of circularity.”
Solve the daily Crossword
