New business recycles children’s designer clothes

New Zealand re-loved online marketplace, Little Outfitters, has been launched to provide parents with a one-shop platform to cycle their children’s designer clothing and accessories, saving and making money in the process. 

The ease of buying more, facilitated by fast fashion and sites offering free shipping/returns at bargain prices, means the average consumer now purchases 60% more clothing than 15 years ago. Moreover, consumers kept that clothing for only half as long as they used to, according to a recent Mckinsey report on the State of Fashion 2019.   

Little Outfitters is attempting to reshape this cycle of consumption. The Auckland-based platform encourages parents to sell their pre-loved children’s clothing and, in so doing, enables other parents a lower-cost, more environmentally friendly alternative to buying new.   

“We’re not adding more materials to the world. We’re consciously cycling better ones,” says founder Lucy Kirkwood, who saw a gap in the cycled designer market for designer children’s clothing.

“We’re all aware of the environmental cost of fashion, especially with children’s clothing which is worn for a fraction of time before they’ve outgrown them. Recycling rather than discarding gives a second, third or even fourth chance for an item that might otherwise end up in a landfill.”   

From Kenzo to Nature Baby, designer children’s brands for 0-10 years will be bought, sold, and re-loved from June this year. This not only enables accessibility to coveted labels, but also to higher-quality micro-fashion.   

For Kirkwood, it was crucial that the Little Outfitters platform had absolute usability. She worked tirelessly with the developers from Onscreen Studio over eight months to build an innovative site with the time-poor parent in mind.

“Parents can list an item in just three steps, and we also have optimum mobile usability, instant payment, and a rental service in the pipeline,” she said.   

The website’s look and feel was created by Kirkwood herself, who also manages Friends Of Friends, the highly-acclaimed graphic and spatial design studio.    

“I wanted to create a platform that reflected a modern and playful aesthetic. And I think we’ve achieved that.”