Steering Excess Clothing Away From Landfills: An Interview With NuSource

Madison Mavis is the Director of Sustainability and Partnerships for NuSource, where she forms partnerships with fashion brands and nonprofits to divert excess inventory or donations from waste streams. She is an active member of the Act on Fashion coalition, advocating for the swift passage of the New York Fashion Act.

Labor 411 Editor, Sahid Fawaz, talked with Madison to learn about NuSource.

SF: Thank you for taking the time to talk about NuSource. Can you tell me a little about the company?

MM: We officially launched NuSource last month, after an investment partner acquired our whole team out of an organization called Helpsy.

NuSource is an excess inventory solution and resale infrastructure partner to fashion brands, retailers, and secondhand stores. As I’m sure you and your readers are probably aware, the planet is drowning in clothing, and brands don’t always know what to do with any excess stock leftover from a season that they haven’t sold. Or sometimes a retail order gets canceled, and they can’t find a home for these items that they produce.

That’s where NuSource steps in. We offer to purchase this excess inventory, or even customer returns and damaged-out products. We offer to purchase all of that stock in an effort to incentivize them not to throw them away or incinerate them, (because that’s a common solution). We are like a matchmaking system, where we will then go and find another home for these pieces. We also work with many nonprofit organizations. They’re often flooded with clothing donations that they can’t find a home for. Oftentimes, brands will dump unwanted donations on a nonprofit for the tax write off, and then the nonprofit has to deal with warehousing all these pieces if their client base isn’t interested in (or able to receive) those items. Sometimes they just don’t have the bandwidth to sort through everything or take the time to list it online, and market it and try to find right a buyer.

I read a statistic that from 10% to 30% of the items that are donated to Goodwill are sold at full price of their store. The remaining 70% to 90% are sold in those crazy big outlet stores or bailed up and sold to a textile recycler for pennies a pound. And then those other partners down the supply chain, may throw any unwanted items either in the trash or shipping things overseas. The supply chain can get pretty crazy. Those are not the best solutions, so we purchase these items from nonprofits.

I’m sure you’re wondering, what do we do with all these items? We have a vast distribution network with thousands of secondhand store partners, vintage dealers, and online resellers that are always on the hunt for supply that their customers are looking for. So, we resell these pieces to a mom-and-pop thrift store, or someone who has their own side hustle or full-time job selling on Poshmark or Ebay. So, these pieces all stay in the US. They don’t get burnt, they don’t get landfilled, and they find a new home.

SF: Do clothes that end up in landfills end up in US ones? Or are they mostly sent to overseas landfills?

MM: This is an area that deserves more attention and research. It’s a very murky supply chain. We’ve seen many stories come out about how we export all our textile waste to Ghana or Chile or some of these other countries that are then flooded with our “donations”. Many of these countries have robust secondhand selling infrastructures, because they’ve just been receiving so many clothing donations over the years, and things have just been exported to their country. But even they can’t move through everything. The quality of donations has become significantly worse, especially in the last 10 to 20 years. The low quality of fast fashion, ultra-fast fashion – pieces aren’t lasting as long and getting crazy damaged so they’re left with a lot of trash.

SF: What percentage of returns end up being thrown away by brands and retailers instead of resold?

MM: That number really changes depending on who you’re talking to. I’ve seen anywhere from 10% to 50% to 80%.

We have partnerships with a few different companies that are international brands. They would ship directly from their facility to customers here in the US. But if the customers wanted to make a return, they would have to ship it all the way back. And the brand would have to process it themselves. Sometimes they don’t sell that item anymore, or they don’t know what to do with it once it shows up. It can take too much time and effort without much return on investment.

There are many incentives for these brands to keep their returns in the country in which it was sold in the first place. In response, NuSource offers to receive all of their US based customer returns. We’ll process them and will resell them to our customers here in the US.

SF: How has the reception been to brands that you have approached?

MM: A lot of brands that I’ve been talking to recently have been like, “oh my god, it’s about time! We need a solution like this.” We also try to offer a lot more transparency into where these pieces end up. We know exactly which state we ship their products to. We know what kind of organization is reselling them, whether it’s a brick-and-mortar store or online reseller. We offer more brand protection, too, than a TJ Maxx or any other kind of off-price retailer.

Because NuSource has a diverse and expansive distribution and many kinds of customers, we have the ability to exert some control over how a brand’s goods get distributed. So, if a brand doesn’t want to jeopardize its firsthand sales or brand value, we can say, “Yeah, no problem. We can sell these pieces to someone at a brick-and-mortar thrift store in Minnesota, where you don’t have stores.” Or if they’re concerned about perceived brand value we can restrict sales to people on specific selling platform, and how THEY sell to their customers.

We have customers on booming platforms like Whatnot and Jamble who engage in live-selling of clothing for hours at time. We are able to provide them with a large inventory of clothing. Because it’s a live-selling experience, you don’t see the brand’s pieces listed online or at TJ Maxx for way cheaper. The live-selling phenomenon provides protection for the brands that are concerned with their image.

SF: Do you find yourselves working mostly with brands as opposed to middlemen and manufacturers?

MM: Yes, mostly brands and nonprofits and retailers as well. And we also work with some other really exciting startups in the space that offer different services to brands. I personally would love to have more of a partnership with upcyclers and people who repair goods or remanufacture things.

SF: What’s an upcycler?

MM: It’s someone who takes a piece of clothing or product and redesigns it or changes it up in a creative way to then add value to that. So, if a shirt has a big stain on it, for example, that person could tie-dye it and add some embellishment. Now it’s an upcycled piece.

SF: Is NuSource the only company of its kind? Or are there others doing the same?

MM: I can’t think of anybody doing exactly what we do, because we’re also very experienced in the secondhand clothing space. Our team is so well-versed in condition, sorting, merchandising and maximizing value from these products. And we’re always on the up-and-up and being as transparent as possible, in an industry that often is not.

SF: I see that you are involved with the Fashion Act. Could you tell me a little about that?

MM: Certainly, although I have truthfully been a bit more removed from the advocacy work after I moved from New York (where the bill was first introduced) to California about 2 years ago (which now has its own version of the bill as well!). I’m looking forward to working more on the California version now!

The Fashion Act is a huge piece of legislation, that if passed, would help regulate the biggest fashion brands in the world. It would require any brand making over $100 million in annual revenue to measure, disclose and then mitigate their negative environmental impacts, including hazardous chemical use and GHG emissions.

I’ve lobbied a few times at the NY state level in support of the bill, and it seems that with each passing session, more and more legislators are responsive to working on this issue.

I also lobbied at the federal level this past May to bring more attention to boosting the secondhand industry within the country, and was very pleased to hear that folks from both sides of the aisle were interested in supporting that portion of the fashion ecosystem. The growth of the secondhand industry is outpacing the growth of traditional retail by 3x. It makes a lot of sense to encourage this growth, from an economic, social and environmental perspective.