Atelier Riforma

Atelier Riforma is an innovative social startup Our mission is to reduce the environmental and social impact of the fashion industry, promoting its transition towards a more circular model

Atelier Riforma is an innovative social startup created in 2019 by Elena Ferrero and Sara Secondo and incorporated in 2020 in Turin. Their mission is to reduce the environmental impact of the textile-fashion industry through the circular economy. At the beginning they have pursued this goal through sartorial upcycling: collecting used clothes, giving them new value through tailoring and reselling them online (creating the first e-commerce in Italy dedicated to upcycling). The “sartorial network” that we created gathers more than 25 realities spread throughout Italy: it includes tailors, designers, various artisans, fashion schools and social tailoring projects, where disadvantaged people can find a job. After this experience we decided to change our business model, focusing on the sorting process and on technology, in order to apply our circular model on a larger scale. Textile waste, infact, is more and more and managing it in a sustainable and economically profitable way is a real challenge. There are solutions to recover used clothes: for ex, if they are in good condition they can be resold as second-hand, if they are made 100% of a single recyclable textile fiber, they can be recycled and if they have small correctable defects, they can be refashioned through tailoring. The problem is that, for directing the garments to these circular destinations, careful sorting is required. Currently this process is done by hand and requires time and resources.For this reason, nowadays less than 1% of all textile material is recycled into new clothing. To address this problem, after 3 years of experience in the management of used clothes within Atelier Riforma, Elena and Sara have created Re4Circular. It is a technological tool for classifying, digitizing and valorizing end-of-life clothes. This tool is provided to all those organizations that collect discarded clothes, so that they can use it to catalog and “digitize” what they collect. The images and data of all the garments catalogued then converge on Re4Circular B2B digital marketplace, through which they can wholesale their garments to circular fashion businesses that are searching used garments for their activity (e.g. thrift shops, recycling companies and refashioning professionals). In this way, Re4Circular matches supply and demand of used clothes, reducing the amount of textile waste that ends up in landfills and ensuring that it is used as a raw material to produce circular products.