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15 May 2025
Disclaimer… We’re a preloved kids clothes website…of course we think you should buy preloved! (Preferably from us ? )
But we’re also really interested in the whole sustainable fashion movement as a whole. Chances are if you’re here reading this on our site then you’re already a preloved fan, but we’re really interested in HOW and WHY attitudes towards buying preloved have been shifting over the past few years.
When I was a teenager I wouldn’t have been seen dead in a second-hand shop. There was a real assumption that second-hand was only for ‘poor’ people who couldn’t afford to buy new things. But 2 decades later in 2021, that assumption and stigma has most definitely gone. With influential fashionistas like Daisy Lowe regularly sharing their vintage fashion finds, high-end brands like Mignonette offering a buy-back scheme for their designer dresses, and even Carrie Symons choosing to rent her dress for her wedding to the prime minister, second-hand is definitely no longer second-best, and it’s no longer a solely financial decision either – it’s a whole lifestyle choice. In fact revenue from the second-hand clothes industry is predicted to overtake that of the fast fashion industry over the next decade.
At BAB for the past 2 years we’ve run a survey on our Facebook page, asking people why they buy preloved – is it for financial reasons, because they like a bargain, for environmental reasons, or something else?
In November 2019 we got 175 votes in total, of which 137 of them shopped preloved because they liked a bargain (78%), 27 wanted to help the environment (15%), and 11 did it for both reasons (6%)
In March 2021 we repeated the poll and recieved 165 votes in total, of which 35 liked a bargain (21%), 12 shopped solely to help the environment (7%), and 118 of them shopped for both reasons (72%).
It’s not the most scientific poll in the world, as we didn’t run it in exactly the same format each time. Nevertheless it gives an interesting insight into shifting attitudes and points to increasing motivation to help the environment AS WELL as solely to save money in people’s reasons for shopping preloved (although interestingly not as a stand-alone choice). We plan to repeat the poll each year to see what happens!
The great thing about preloved is whatever your motivation, you’re automatically getting the other benefits too – so even if you aren’t shopping preloved to help the environment, it will still have that effect.
We also asked our customers if they had any other reasons for buying/selling preloved clothes, and the answers were a great insight, here are some of them –
This brings us onto our next question – HOW does shopping preloved help the environment?
When I first joined this industry I thought originally that buying pre-loved was just about stopping clothes going to landfill, and that was all there was to it. I patted myself on the back for stopping clothes being binned, but didn’t really know much else about the environmental impact of how the clothes we wear are produced.
While in the early stages of setting up BAB I started reading more about the fashion industry, and I was shocked at what I discovered, and the impact that the manufacture of new clothes has on the environment.
Its not just about the landfill, that’s only a tiny part of it… it’s also about the amount of water, energy and resources that goes into producing material for new items, the damage cotton production does to the landscapes (in some cases drying up entire seas!) and water supplies of the countries it is made in. It’s about the pollution and carbon footprint caused by the manufacturing process and transporting the items halfway across the world, and the huge impact this has on climate change –
The fashion industry is the second biggest polluting industry in the world, more polluting than aviation and shipping combined… that’s crazy when you think about it!
The World Bank estimates that the fashion industry is responsible for 20% of all industrial water pollution annually, devours 25% of chemicals produced worldwide, and is responsible for 10% of the carbon emissions in our air – 1kg of cloth produced creates 23kg of greenhouse gases. The World Wildlife Fund has stated it can take up to 2,700 litres of water to grow the cotton for 1 t-shirt (Source for all the above – Fashionopolis by Dana Thomas, p.7). Supply chains are fractured and spread across the world, so fabric is made in one country, shipped to another to be cut, sent to yet another location to be sewn, and finished with zippers somewhere else. That’s even before you consider the massive wastage of packaging that new garments come wrapped in, or the disgraceful way some garment workers have been treated and underpaid by big fashion companies (google ‘Rana Plaza factory collapse’ and the ‘Pay Up campaign’ for more info).
The fact that increased awareness of environmental issues in recent years has certainly helped to drive the switch to preloved, renting and slow fashion (buying less, and buying better), over fast fashion. We’ve got David Attenborough at Glastonbury and Greta Thunberg on the national news, and awareness of what we’re doing to our planet is certainly higher than 20 years ago. But we can all do more to spread the preloved word… tell your friends, and shout out about your preloved bargains!
We would never tell anyone to stop buying new stuff completely … we sell some new items ourselves, and a good pre-loved market requires newer stuff coming into it as well. However we do think it’s clear that the world’s consumption of brand new fast fashion items is unsustainable and needs to drop considerably. When you shop pre-loved you’re really making the most of the resources that have already been used to create that item, rather than creating demand for new resources to be used.
One thing we do battle with as a preloved site is that fast fashion kids clothes can be so cheap – when H&M sell brand new kids summer dresses at £3 and Primark sell t-shirts at £1.30, how can we compete with that second-hand? Not everyone can afford to shop at the more ethical sustainable brands, so cheaper shops definitely have their place, but when fast fashion is so cheap it completely devalues the resources put into it and makes the garment easily disposable.
But hopefully the above has shown that buying second-hand is not just about the financial cost, it’s about the environmental cost too – and that’s a lot higher than a couple of pounds!
Fast fashion is “a model that’s manifestly unsustainable. That celebrates endless consumption, ever lower prices… and even larger returns. That consciously yields leftovers. That gives no thought to the toll it takes on the environment… We all have to step up. Buy less. Wash our clothes differently. Repair or upcycle them more” (Dana Thomas – Fashionopolis)
For anyone who’s interested in the environmental impacts of fast fashion we’ve tried to put together a few links below ? it makes really interesting reading if you have a few minutes! We also highly recommend Dana Thomas’s wonderful book ‘Fashionopolis’ for a hard-hitting look behind the scenes of the fashion industry.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/bbcthree/article/5a1a43b5-cbae-4a42-8271-48f53b63bd07
https://www.theguardian.com/business/2019/jun/22/cost-cheap-fast-fashion-workers-planet