[00:00:00]Barry O’Kane: Welcome back to HappyPorch Radio, the Circular Economy Technology Podcast. Every episode you can expect a robust, thought provoking and idea inspiring conversation with leading experts, thinkers, and doers at the intersection of technology and the circular economy.
This special episode was prompted by an exchange on LinkedIn, one that was so good and passionate that we agreed to continue the conversation with a special episode of the podcast. And that exchange was prompted by the ongoing and very fluid impact of the recent US tariff and di minimis input rules on circularity, both here in the UK and the EU and in the US.
Our discussion ranges widely from there, covering everything from policy to the importance of smaller ethical brands to circularity.
So huge thanks to my guests, Charlotte and Ryan, for the inspiring energy expertise and empathy that they bring to this episode. And I hope you enjoy the conversation as much as I did.
[00:01:07] Charlotte Morley: Hello. My name is Charlotte Morley. I am the founder and CEO of The Little Loop. We are various things: We provide a turnkey take back and resale solution for currently kidswear brands, soon to be all brands. We also have the leading kidswear resale marketplace in the UK. And we're helping to drive the transition to a circular economy.
[00:01:30] Barry O’Kane: Wonderful. Thank you. Welcome to HappyPorch Radio.
[00:01:33] Ryan Atkins: Hi, I'm Ryan Atkins, co-founder and CEO of Supercycle. We’re a circular commerce platform that allows businesses to launch circular first businesses. So whether that's rental, resale, or products of service, you can indeed bring circular models to your existing linear or for sale business model, so you can do purchase, rent, subscribe, membership, a number of different circular models, same product page, same checkout, same customer experience, et cetera.
[00:02:01] Barry O’Kane: Thank you and welcome to you as well.
And just for the listeners, this is our second go and my wonderful guests have been very generous with their time because we had a little bit of an error with the recording in the first one. But the reason for this special episode of the podcast, it came out of an exchange on LinkedIn. And so to set the scene, Ryan, I thought it might be interesting, first of all to hear you. What prompted that post and what you were talking about on LinkedIn and then Charlotte to her response to that. And we can go from there.
[00:02:27] Ryan Atkins: So I was following the proposed tariffs. And considering the implications of what that might mean, if it's more difficult to get new products in from abroad what could that mean? Whether that's bringing manufacturing locally, or indeed, you know, driving demand for products which are already in the country and if you are driving demand for products already in the country. I guess I was connecting the dots between that and there'll probably be a boom in resale because of that.
So it was really just kind of me following on from the reports, the trends, tying a few loose ends together and me articulating that I believe, with tariffs and specifically the De Minimis rules changing there'll be a customer boom for not a new product.
[00:03:09] Barry O’Kane: And then that prompted some really interesting debate on LinkedIn. And one of the responses that really attracted my attention, Charlotte, was your thoughts around that conversation.
[00:03:18] Charlotte Morley: Yeah, I think, I said this last time we were chatting, I think at the time I was quite sensitised to how brands and me and Ryan, we both work really closely with brands and our businesses rely on those brands and the success those brands thrive because ultimately we provide services to them and, I therefore spend quite a lot of time chatting to brands, and I'm in various groups with them, particularly at the moment, small kidswear brands, they're brands who are doing things already very well.
They're sustainable, they're ethical, they're using organic fabrics, et cetera. And I was really sensitised to the fact that tariffs have brought so many of them to their knees. It was like another blow, that we had the price of raw materials going up with the war in Ukraine, and they were already struggling and there’s also the macroeconomics of consumer confidence and consumer spending reducing.
And then, they've been hit by the likes of Shein and Temu coming into the market, price gouging, and then tariffs hit them. And, I'm seeing these brands literally I think I'm gonna have to shut down. I can't keep going. And so when I saw Ryan's post, I think I'm happy to hold my hands up to this. I think I maybe lost perspective somewhat and got quite cross about the fact that yes, of course the loss of De Minimis and the increase in tariffs could be in the long term a good thing because it should hopefully, the benefit of secondary, of the secondary market because it relies less on imports and et cetera, and supply chains, my fear is that for a strong circular economy, we have to have great, what I would describe as feedstock, and we have to have fantastic brands in the first place, creating really good quality product and putting it on the market for us to resell.
We want to work with those brands, and they are unfortunately the brands who are at this point in time struggling the most. I was sitting and dwelling on this problem when I saw Ryan's post and was like, No, it's not that simple. Because actually the risk is that we never get to a point where the circular economy is strengthened by this because the circular economy is undermined by the fact that those great brands die.
And actually, since we last recorded, I've had a bit more, kind of, time and a bit more involvement in looking at legislation, EPR legislation and being involved in some government bits and pieces. So hopefully, I can actually bring a bit more to this conversation on that topic and about how brands are being impacted and what's being done.
[00:05:36] Ryan Atkins: I would love to hear Barry and Charlotte podcast on that Circular Economy Taskforce, Charlotte. I'm really curious about the kind of legislation side of things. I think that's a very fun, detailed conversation to go into. I can completely agree with everything Charlotte said there.
There was a big group of people, founders and CEOs whose livelihoods are dependent on average, is succeeding. And the Trumps have absolutely given them another problem to deal with.
And I think there was a little bit of a lack of consideration for that on my part there. A lot of it, I think, is to do with the people I see and speak to every day, slightly falling outside of that category. I'm not speaking to so many founders of linear businesses. I mean, either speaking to commercial directors and head of e-coms at linear businesses. Or I'm speaking to founders and CEOs of circular first businesses and I sort of spend quite little time speaking with founders of linear businesses that are looking to adopt circular.
[00:06:29] Charlotte Morley: Your point was quite right. Like, ideally, these things should help drive us in a better direction. And actually De Minimis is being touted, like removing the De Minimis loophole in the UK is currently been asked for by the fashion industry in order to help to drive circularity because we want to stop the likes of Shein and Temu being able to ship these low value parcels into the country.
Your point is actually correct, the thing I think that I was curling upon is, yes, this is a good thing, but there will be a lot of fallout from it, and we must take that into account and again I was reflecting today on my brand pipeline and the brands that I've been talking to over the last year, really warming them up to the idea that they might want to run a takeback program, resale program and a lot of them have gone very quiet and people who'd said to me six months ago, yes, we definitely wanna do this, like you know, we're busy now, but talking a couple of months. And I was thinking, oh God, is it me? We're not doing something.
And I realized they're firefighting. They cannot even think about putting circularity in place right now because they're just trying to survive. And I think that's the short term impact for the circular economy is very worrying. Long term, this should have a really beneficial impact. And maybe when I read his post, I should have been able to say, yeah, you are right, in the long term, this will be great. It is hard. It is really hard to watch these fantastic businesses who are doing everything in their power to do it right. Struggling so much. It's unfair, but it's not just unfair, they're good businesses as well.
It's also really worrying and it will have a short term impact on us as well, because there will be fewer businesses who've got the bandwidth and the money and the time to implement circularity despite the fact that in the long term it will actually be a benefit for them, it will provide them with some shock absorbers against this because we know that you can generate revenue from the secondary market by owning your own secondary market.
That's what we exist to do. But when you are firefighting, it's really hard to step back and put that in place.
[00:08:25] Barry O’Kane: The sort of positioning I really liked about something you said in your post was using the word, I think, empathy. Empathy and help and viewing with any big challenges, like how can your organisations, our organisations help in this circumstance to build towards that ideal, sort of more shock absorbent future that we're talking about. I'd like to explore that a little bit more and compare and contrast the kinds of conversations you're having now with brands and Ryan as well, with you, you talked about the different types of people you talked to and what does it look like in detail the issues and the questions that they're raising now, and maybe how can we as circular enablers help them?
[00:09:01] Ryan Atkins: So the circle of first merchants I'm speaking to are, I would say, there's an increased confidence in what they're doing. I think they've had a hard time for a long time. You've been battling with a very difficult technical challenge, very difficult logistical challenge, an uphill and expensive education of customers. And things have been starting to switch. Circularity is starting to be more mainstay, starting to, kind of, become part of culture in a way that it really wasn't even two years ago. So I think the circle of first businesses right now are really starting to kind of get to stride.
Let's say the Trump announcements, you know, ThredUp share prices are up like a hundred percent since where they were before. You know, the value of that company is twice what it was prior to the De Minimis announcement. So I think there's quite a lot of optimism on circular entrepreneurs and it's great to see that confidence for brands. I speak to a lot of businesses and circularity kind of sits as a priority and it's sat just below the line of it being the next thing to work on. It's always that kind of priority, three or four, and they might be doing something at arms length but figuring out what to do with all of their returns that can't go back to as new or addressing the fact that their customers are selling their products to each other on marketplaces. How can they start to minimise that competition, bring the stocking themselves and, kind of, capture the opportunity?
Those priorities are starting to just go above the line of, okay, this actually is a priority for the next quarter, the next two quarters. So I'm seeing it as broadly positive for circularity over the last two or three months. However, I think the only thing I would say, I agree with Charlotte's point, I think a lot of it at the moment, everything feels very uncertain. So positive circularity- a very difficult time to do business, I would say across the board.
[00:10:57] Charlotte Morley: Yeah I tend to agree. I think it very much depends on the kind of shape and size of the brand as well. Obviously tiny brands. My crew businesses, which actually make up, as I discovered yesterday, over 90% of the SMEs, certainly in the fashion industry, which is where I'm very much focused, like my crew businesses are struggling because there's a couple of people in that business, maybe only one person in that business, and so when they're even just trying to get their head around tariffs and the impact it's gonna have on them and how they're gonna deal with that shipment that's on its way from China, which is suddenly not gonna be able to be sent into the States because, they simply don't have the bandwidth. I think mid-size businesses and particularly ones who don't rely on wholesaling to the States, the States is a big market for them. They can't sell direct and they have to wholesale into the States. That's been the big issue. But midsize brands, and we work with a few Jojo mamans. One that we've signed recently, we should be launching with them in the summer. And they are absolutely, incredibly keen and it's a real priority for them to have a circularity program. That has come because they've brought on board a new CEO who is very sustainability focused and they see it as a significant kind of strategic priority for the brand or so they're telling me anyway, I'm speaking on their behalf but I think they've been trying to do this for quite a long time and it's been hard.
So I think it's not just about where the brand stands, it's also about how easy we can make it for them because it's an opportunity cost calculation, isn't it? You really want to do it, it's a high priority, but you feel like it's gonna be very difficult. It's going to get deprioritised because it's gonna take too much time. And so there are other things that you're gonna put above it. And particularly when at the moment it's still to an extent in some businesses, Jojo's not one of them actually, still being led by the marketing team. Circularity and sustainability has not yet been seen as a financial driver. It's not really gonna impact the bottom line in their opinion at this point. And so it is still being led somewhat by the marketing team, so it can have a tendency to fall away.
So what can we do about it? First of all, we make it incredibly easy for them. We've taken away a lot of the pain of a lot of the models that are out there at the moment by just making it super easy to plug in, super straightforward revenue model, no thinking required, guaranteed return. And then that plays into not only the kind of opportunity cost conversation, but also can we make some money out of this? Actually yes we can. And we know we can because it's not a, Oh God, if the operation costs don't go up.
I think we have a large part to play in changing the perception of brands and changing the attitude and openness of brands to the ability to run a circularity program by just making it easy, making it a no-brainer. And I know that's something that is really important to both myself and Ryan actually. We do it in different ways, but it is that convenience, it is the fact that you're gonna get a reward from it, but it's hard. It's hard to get your foot in the door in the first place when you're going through a marketing team, when it's not yet seen as a strategic priority, and capturing those brands that do first, then you can demonstrate to others that this is really worth doing.
[00:13:49] Barry O’Kane: I want to go back to the same word again. Empathy. What you're talking about there is understanding. And acknowledging the difficulty instead of going, Hey, there's this circularity thing, it's really important that we do it and then slowly starting to see cases where organisations like yours run, have helped solve all or part of that problem and being able to demonstrate, and here's some data and some examples of where it is working.
My question is, are you seeing that despite the current sort of pressures and given the conversation we just had, but are you seeing that zeitgeist starting to change and more examples or you being able to say, Yes, we can solve these problems. Is it changing the picture a little bit?
[00:14:25] Charlotte Morley: It is changing. It's slow. I wouldn't say we're at a zeitgeist moment yet. And something we were discussing yesterday at the Circular Economy Taskforce was there needs to be a mandate. There does need to be a very strong message coming from government. Actually a legislative mandate that says circularity has to happen. That says circularity is not a marketing gimmick. It is not just about making you relevant to your customer. That's a great benefit of it, but we have to account for our waste. We have to make sure that we've got production, we've got waste management in the middle, we've got reuse. We have to ensure that our resources are being used as much as possible.
And I think what Ryan referred to earlier about this idea that your customers are currently a competition because there are ways out there for them to recirculate and you are missing out on that is so right. And I've been hoping for a long time that would almost produce the mandate, that brands would go, Oh God. This is not only cannibalising us, but also we're not taking a slice of it. But for some reason it's not been enough, and I think it still isn't quite enough because it's quite hard to measure. So yes, there is change. Yes, that's starting to be recognized. That kind of thing is giving us data to help to push brands in the right direction and to launch schemes that they can benefit from. But I do still feel like that does need to be more of a directive from above that kind of mandates circularity and says this is something that you have to be accountable for as well.
[00:15:51] Ryan Atkins: Scotland has a Circular Economy Bill, doesn't it?
[00:15:54]Barry O’Kane: The Act now just came to force last year and what that laid out was a framework for rather than specific actions. And right now they're going through a bunch of consultations and what that looks like. Interestingly, what you were just talking about there, Charlotte, about the focus on reuse. In my opinion, that's not enough of a focus on the Scottish policy conversation yet.
[00:16:13]Charlotte Morley: Not in the UK policy conversation yet either. Now I, in my classic elbows out, head down, “let's get on with it “ style, went in with that very strong opinion that we're focusing too far downstream and there's too much focus on recycling and we should be talking more about reuse.
I used to work in policy so I've forgotten how hard it is to do these things and had to remind myself and we have to start somewhere that's easily measurable, easily deliverable, and then we can start to introduce new things. So I think where I have my eyes opened in doing more research and then in being involved in the conversation, it was the idea that there's a roadmap to delivering a really effective legislation around circular economy, but it has to start somewhere. And where it starts is quite a blunt instrument, which I think has the potential to cause some problems in the short term, but hopefully they can be ironed out as we go.
But along the lines of what the French have got, which is you pay a fee for every garment that you produce or every kilogram of garments that you produce, and that money then goes into paying for recycling infrastructure to make sure that the garment, the waste can be dealt with at the end of life.The point I've been making is that some of that money needs to be directed into the reuse sector as well, because one of the challenges that we have is raising money because nearly everybody driving reuse is a private business and it's very hard to raise because the circular economy margins are tight.
It's not a very VC friendly space. Some businesses are managing to be a bit more VC friendly, but it's not hugely VC friendly. So we need to start to think early about making sure we're shoring up the reuse as well as the recycling end of things.
[00:17:51] Barry O’Kane: Yeah. That's something I'm hoping to explore further and in further episodes of the podcast as well. To your point about the organisations who are looking at reuse and pushing in that Circular Communities Scotland who represent the sort of social enterprise in the third sector, we also have a big interest in the reuse policy. And their pushing and influence on that.
So I think there's a whole massive conversation to be had there. In the context of where we started today, and the sort of large scale changes like the tariffs conversation. I guess my question is, is it a case of Okay, we just need to survive and do what we can to shore up for these brands and businesses to shore up and survive? Or is there things like get involved in longer term thinking, let's push for policy and get involved in those bigger conversations. Or is there sort of concrete things that you're both looking at in terms of your businesses and the brands you're working with now, that can maybe help alleviate or address some of the short term challenges?
[00:18:41] Ryan Atkins: All paths lead to circular. You created a product that customers like, otherwise you wouldn't be in business. And if your priority is I want to make my customers as happy as possible, your customers are buying your products not new. Give them the option to do that on your own website.
If you're a business and you are worried about your P&L and your profitability, look at circular. What are the current costs I have associated with my returns? Can I move those returns back in? If I have customers that love my product and want to keep buying new product, but I want to remove the guilt of them, keep buying more stuff from me, I can remove that guilt.
I allow them to trade in what they previously bought from me and swap it for something new. If you want to, focus on, you know, doing what's right for the planet and your green initiative. Introducing additional levers into the business that allow me to grow my business, which I need to do because salaries get more expensive each year.
So I need to make more money each year to continue to pay my staff, even when I want to make no additional profit, which if you're a business, you probably want to make more profit. But you know, how can you do that in the greatest possible way as well? Well, how can I increase the percentage of revenue and profit that comes into my business that doesn't mandate or need new manufacturing?
I kind of think, find what it is that you care about within your business, what your particular pressure points are. What impact it is that you want to have on the world and I'm entirely sure I'll be able to plot what you want as to how circularity is a part of that path of the things you want to achieve.
That's obviously me coming out from a circularity perspective because that's the impact that I want to have on the world. And I'm not saying circularity is the only way you can achieve the things you want in the world, but I can absolutely plot a path for whatever it's that you are trying to achieve in the world as an entrepreneur or as someone as part of a business growing it where circularity allows you to achieve the goals that you've set yourself regardless of whether that is, I want to do circularity as a path to it.
[00:20:38] Charlotte Morley: I think that covers it pretty well. We can't solve the problems that brands are facing. We can't take those problems away. What we can do is give them something else to think about and something else to shout about and to celebrate something that helps them to compete. Actually something that levels the playing field.
Because actually, we know that the take-back scheme that we offer makes it so easy for customers. They find it quite joyful actually. And they've started to write reviews on our brand websites to say, Wow, thank you for having this scheme. And we know that people are choosing to shop with our brands because they know that there is a guaranteed outlet for their clothes when they no longer need them.
That is easy and rewarding. And we've gone beyond the theory of what the circular economy can do and started to see the kind of proof that this is helping those brands to stand out and compete in a market where at the moment like everyone's doing it. I think that's where we're still at, right? That actually circularity can be a differentiator. And also for brands that do think they'll get through and that they'll survive and they'll stay the course it won’t soon be a differentiator, but it will be mandated and it will be a must-have. And you have to future-proof yourself. So if you have any spare capacity, and you can cope with the immediate threats to life for your business. Once you get through that, actually being able to start to work on things which will future-proof you, which will be things that you absolutely have to do. You have to report on your circularity and because other brands are gonna have it, if you don't have it, you are gonna stand out.
Then being able to do that and feel like you're moving forward positively is obviously an enormous mental burden lifted as well, and you couldn't start to do that. Doing it with an enabler who makes it easy for you and takes a lot of the burden away as well. So you're not having to write lengthy P&Ls on how does resale work and stack up and what might happen because if it’s done for you, it can only be a good thing. So it's if you've got that tiny bit of time, I think it's definitely worth doing it because there's so much benefit from a consumer, and I say consumer because my customers are brands and consumers. If you can make consumers happy and if you can distinguish yourself for the consumer then you are gonna stay the course. Otherwise you're just gonna get lost and you can't compete with a price gouging that comes from the huge players.
[00:22:54] Barry O’Kane: I thought there was something interesting when you were talking about feedstock. In my understanding is that largely the folks that are focusing on the quality product, like they who care about the quality of the product, maybe they're focused on sustainability or longer lasting or whatever the driver for their product is, they tend to be the smaller players. Is that a fair assumption? And so are we seeing them being under more pressure?
[00:23:14] Charlotte Morley: It is an interesting one. I was chatting to the former CEO of Hubbub the other day, Trewin, and he was saying that they did a study. I didn't know about this, and not so many years ago now, it was on denim, which I personally don't think is the best thing to have done it on, but it was a quality study and it was to see if there was a correlation between price and quality. And what they found that certainly with jeans was there wasn't always that correlation. Some of the most expensive jeans were actually poor quality and some of the cheaper jeans were better quality.
So it's a bit too crude to say that the smaller brands are making better quality product. Certainly in our experience that is true. But even some of the big brands make really good quality products. We use Marks and Spencer as a baseline. We say Marks and Spencer up for the clothes that we'll accept. Because that helps most people visualize what we mean. Marks and Spencer produces very good quality clothing. It's not as good quality as the organic and ethical brands that we work with. Understandably, they're producing at a much higher volume, but it's good quality and it's good enough to resale and critically its price point is high enough to make resale viable because when you start to dip into the fast fashion prices, actually, if you can buy a T-shirt for eight pounds, then you're gonna have to resell it for two pounds. it just doesn't work because you cannot do the operational processing and still make a profit on it.
So there is a bit of an unspoken elephant in the room, it really isn't coming up very often at a lot of these discussions, which is those massive fast fashion producers can't really make resale viable, certainly in any other way than via marketplace where consumers are doing it themselves and there are no operating costs and basically the consumers are making a loss. They are recirculating them, but nobody's making any money outta that, and it's not really financially viable. A lot of businesses are gonna have to send their stuff straight to recycling, which in an ideal world, that's what the legislation should be preventing. If you can't resell your clothes, you shouldn't be able to produce them in the first place.
It does tend to be the smaller brands that are slightly higher price point. Not only can it be resale because the price structure works, actually we can sell it at a cheaper cost, but it's still profitable. But the quality genuinely does, certainly in our experience with kidswear, it is way better. And it lasts and we track how many times a garment is recirculated and we actually pay the brand a percentage of the resales every time it resells. So not just on the first resale. We keep the brand affiliated to that garment all the way through.
Because the way we see it is if a garment can be recirculated six times, that's because the brand put quality in it in the first place and they should be rewarded each time it recirculates. And we see brands where the clothing is coming back through us 3, 4, 5 times and that's incredible. That's what we should all be aiming for.
[00:25:57] Ryan Atkins: I really like that you started as rental as well, Charlotte, because I feel, like you have a very similar view on circularity as I do, which was saying resale, but for me, resale is basically rental. I buy something, I sell it again. I've incurred a cost for the period of time. The product was useful and valuable to me, and then it gets cycled to the next person. And resale really is just a word for when the payment happens. You have an inbound leg, you have an outbound leg. If it's, both of those legs happen with one customer, it's a rental. If one of those happens and then it goes, you know, it goes back to the brand.
That's a trade in. If it goes in and back out again, then it's trade followed by a resale. Essentially the cycles are the same. Rental resale subscription. They're all just different labels for essentially when the payment happens and who owns that product as it goes round that cycle.
But I can just see from the way you're speaking about it, getting the brand paid each time and you know, six cycles per product. I feel like a lot of that comes from or certainly did for me. Maybe I'm projecting here, but a lot of that comes from that kind of initial rental.
[00:26:58]Charlotte Morley: It's really insightful, Ryan, because what we did when we pivoted our business out of rental into resale was not abandoned rental. We said, how can we make rental actually work for the consumer? Bear in mind we're in kidswear, we're not in high end luxury. It works in different ways, in different verticals and different consumers, but in kidswear rental was not working because people want to own their children's wear. They're terrified about damaging it. We couldn't educate enough to break the cycle of ownership, what we could do was make a user experience. Tools that they can use and prompts and just all the little subtle elements of how we do resale that effectively are delivering rental.
So you're absolutely right. Just the fact that we have a closet where when you buy it, it sits in there with its resale price and a little button that you just go, I wanna trade this in now. It's not, I've sold this, I'm wishing that someone's going to resell it. It's, we've literally telling you to resell it. That it can have another life and it can keep going round, so you're absolutely right, Ryan.
We don't really see a distinction in that way between rental and resale in terms of what the end goal is. Keeping those garments in circulation, making it as easy as possible for the customer to do it. The distinction is simply in, I hesitate to say this because I don't want to sound like I'm trying to lie to people, but it's tricking the consumer into thinking that they're doing it in a way that they’re more used to. Yeah. So we're building it in a way that makes it easy for people because cognitively they're not having to think this is doing something different and it actually is, we're making it feel like they're not.
We did this survey, we surveyed 2000 people, parents. So we were looking again at kidswear, but we surveyed 2000 parents and we said, do you buy secondhand clothes? Do you sell your kids’ clothes? 84% of them buy, 34% of them sell. Because it's hard work, that was the light bulb moment for us because what we absolutely have to do, and it goes back to the feedstock point, is we've got to keep good quality product going into the secondhand market.
Otherwise the secondhand market isn't as good as it could be and it dies and there's obviously, there's less revenue being made, right? Closing that gap, making sure that there's as much being sold in as people are trying to buy out is absolutely critical. And the reason that it's not being done is because it's not being made as easy as renting. Returning your rental clothes just feels like a thing you do. I'm just sending it back. Whereas reselling clothes feels, Oh, I've got to photograph it and I've got to list it.
That's exactly what we've done with our model is we've made the selling of the clothes so easy. That we then have an amazing product range. And then of course, the buying just comes organically. And that's the key. What we do with our brands is make it so easy for their customers to resell their clothes. It's all these little nuances of what you build that make or break a business and make a circular model that works. of the biggest challenges is that the people who invest in businesses don't see those subtleties. 'cause they're not using it. And not always the businesses that are doing it like that, that get the investment, because it's very hard to communicate those nuances in a kind of investor-ready-way getting it across to brands as well.
Although that's somewhat easier because of the way they're thinking about it.
[00:30:03] Barry O’Kane: Yeah, exactly. That's fascinating. And to hear the energy in both of your voices we're talking about is really exciting and fun. And I think, just to pick up on something there, you hesitated by using the word tricking. And I think the way that you then went on to describe it is the right phrase.
It's not tricking, it's about making it easy and fun and rewarding, whether that's, as my identity, with fashion or financially or whatever. Because it's creating those, optimizing those services and those experiences in a way that retail has done over the last 80 years.
[00:30:28] Charlotte Morley: The psychology of it, it's absolutely fascinating. Things like we have a clear out service that sits separately from our brand integration, so you can just fill up a bag and send it to us. We sell those bags to people and we were like “No one's gonna buy a bag to fill with clothes.” They only cost a pound each. And that literally covers the cost of the bag and its outbound shipping. We then cover the cost of the inbound shipping, people buy them because it's a service they really want. But of course the psychology is because they've bought it, they then use it because they've paid for it. Whereas otherwise, if we gave them away for free, 80% of them would be sitting in a cupboard drawer not used. So psychology around what we do is absolutely fascinating and understanding it's critical to success.
[00:31:08] Barry O’Kane: Awesome. Thank you. I'm really aware of time and even though this conversation is fun, I unfortunately have the bad job of cutting it short. But thank you and I also thank you both. One for re-recording and redoing this conversation after my error. But also for, we talked about the word empathy there and sharing and not shying away from the difficulty and the challenges, but really getting excited about the possibility and the opportunity.
And we finished hopefully there on a positive, excited note. Despite the reality of some of the challenges that many of these businesses face. Just finally, for those listening who want to find out more about the work that you do, where should they go?
[00:31:42] Ryan Atkins: For me, I’m quite active on LinkedIn. Ryan Atkins on LinkedIn. But primarily Supercycle.com
[00:31:48] Charlotte Morley: And for me, I think from the customer side of things, the consumer side of things, thelittleloop.com, if you're a brand who's interested in learning more [email protected], it's always best to have a conversation.
[00:31:59] Barry O’Kane: Thank you. Really appreciate your time again.
[00:32:01] Charlotte Morley: Thank you. Thanks so much. Thanks Ryan. Appreciate it.
[00:32:04] Ryan Atkins: Likewise.
[00:32:07] Outro: This podcast is brought to you by happyporch.com. Whether you need bespoke software development, fractional CTO support, or just expert advice, HappyPorch is here to support your circular economy initiatives. If you're driving innovation and circularity, we'd love to chat.