The Joy of SuperLooping!

SuperLooper CIC is a circular economy-inspired pre-loved baby clothing rental service created to help parents dress their babies in lots of lovely clothes whilst reducing waste and making better use of clothes already in circulation.  

Babies grow so quickly and their outgrown clothes have often only been worn a few times. So, instead of parents buying and owning their baby’s clothes, why not rent them for as long as they’re needed and then swap them for the next size up? 

Our customers are parents who love dressing their baby in sweet clothes but feel guilty about over consuming. They’re people who choose to use pre-loved clothing which they find after a trawl through second hand outlets or acquire from well-meaning family and friends handing down their outgrown treasures. (Sometimes these things aren’t actually wanted or needed by the ‘lucky’ recipients who end up with a load of things they now have to get rid of!) With SuperLooper, parents can choose as many clothes as they want from an already curated selection and have their order delivered to their door.

Hubbub, the environmental campaigners, found that there are 183 million items of outgrown baby clothes stored away in UK cupboards. There are multiple understandable reasons why parents do this – they may be planning more babies, they may be emotionally attached to certain things, they may intend to pass them on or sell them. But, ultimately, these clothes too often end up forgotten about and gathering dust. As a mum of three, I have to admit to still holding onto some of the clothes worn by my kids … and they’re now in their teens and twenties!  

All this hoarding is a terrible waste of resources and money – and is where SuperLooper comes in with a mission to get lightly-worn clothes back into circulation and worn for as long as possible. Recycling minimises the need for so much textile and clothing production and its inherent negative environmental impact, and reduces the amount of textile waste ending up in landfills.

Not only do SuperLooper users update their order as their baby grows, they can also choose a new-to-them wardrobe if the season changes or if they simply want to try-out new styles and colours. The subscription is just £23 per month, which includes delivery and returns fees and clothing rental to the value of £20 – if they want more items they just add them to their cart and pay at checkout. A report by Ergo Baby found that first time parents in the UK spend on average £83 per month in the first year of a baby’s life, so we can save them time, money and storage space.  

We make recycling a bit of a no-brainer for parents who love fashion but feel uncomfortable about buying too much.  All the clothes in our library have been given to us either by parents doing a ‘conscious clear-out’ of their cupboards or by brands who want to make sure that their overstock and sample items go to good use. We get other people involved by offering gift vouchers for friends, grandparents and workmates to give to new parents, so in this way we can all play a part in reducing some of the waste that inevitably happens when we have babies.  

We’re all about collaboration – we work with other like-minded businesses that complement what we do and help us build awareness of the whys, hows and whats of our service.  

Locally we’ve teamed up with Zero Waste Brighton as part of Bella Kennard’s Low Waste Parenting Group, where parents can meet-up every month at Wrap’s work & play space in Brighton.  As well as SuperLooper, this brings together other sustainable baby services like nappy and sling libraries. 

Via the ‘SuperLooper Loves’ page on our website, we work with brands that complement what we do. So far, we’ve joined the Jubblies (reusable nursing pads) and Nimble (child-friendly cleaning products) affiliate programmes.  This means our customers get to know about great products and enjoy a bit of discount while we benefit from a little bit of extra income and more exposure to a wider audience.

We’re very proud of our Brand SuperLoop collaboration which we recently launched with the backing of Little Green Radicals, the London based organic and fair-trade baby clothing company. Realising that there are plenty of people who don’t want to dress their baby in pre-loved clothes, but who do want to do their bit for the planet, we’ve set up a scheme which includes them too. It offers an opportunity for the brand’s customers to return their outgrown items in exchange for a voucher to redeem when they next shop with the brand. This returned stock is then added to the SuperLooper library ready to go to another home.  

Through the data we collect, participating brands can gain valuable feedback on the longevity of their products and, where necessary, can make improvements. They also build a more meaningful engagement with existing customers and attract new ones through their positive sustainability messaging.  Of course, SuperLoopers hugely benefit too by having access to more great clothes – a win-win for all, including the planet. Little Green Radicals have added one of their retailers to their SuperLoop so now their customers can join, on and off-line. We’re now adding Lucy & Sam to the scheme and we’re talking to other genuinely sustainable brands who want to join us too.    

You can find more about the Little Green Radicals SuperLoop here.

We take care to focus on sustainable and ethical working practices wherever we can. We use recycled and re-usable cardboard boxes, sustainably produced tissue paper, flyers and stickers and we deliver our local orders by bike. We know we can do more and are working hard to reduce our carbon footprint as much as possible going forward.

SuperLooper addresses The UN SDG (Sustainable Development Goals) numbers 12 – sustainable consumption and production – and 13 – climate change. Our aim is to:

• Reduce waste, avoid over-consumption and change the way people shop

• Create a platform to make it easy and attractive for parents to re-cycle baby clothes

• Build a supportive network of parents wanting to connect and do their bit for the planet

• Create a nationwide operation that is scalable globally

In other areas of good business practice, we’re members of the Brighton & Hove Living Wage Campaign and employ someone we were lucky enough to find as a perfect match via the KickStart scheme managed locally by social change incubator Koreo. Kate has now been taken on as a valued permanent member of our team. I was introduced to this scheme by fellow Good Business Club members Jo Godden, of Ruby Moon, and Iain Chambers, of The Bevy and The Brighton Food Factory. 

We’re currently developing a scheme to include families on low income in our SuperLooper family. We believe that we can’t have a significant impact on increasing the lifeline of baby clothes unless we involve as many people as possible – too often these ideas are only available to people on higher incomes, so we want to change that pattern.

Before SuperLooper, I’d previously run an organic baby and children’s clothing brand but this was a fresh and disruptive business model and I liked the idea of creating something that hadn’t existed before. I fully believe in living and working with a purpose and, although I love fashion and clothes, I never felt quite right working in an industry so largely polluting and harmful to its workers and to the environment. The idea of sharing and recycling what already exists ticked a lot of boxes for me.  

I ‘conceived’ SuperLooper in 2017 as a result of a chance meeting in the coffee queue at the Brighton Chamber Summit! After a long labour involving focus and beta test groups and support from friends and experts from the fashion industry, The Sussex Innovation Centre, UnLtd, Yermi, The Mumpreneurs Club, Circular Brighton & Hove, The Co-Women’s Club, The NatWest Accelerator and of course The Good Business Club, our ‘baby’ was finally born in October 2020!  

I now have a business partner, Ashwin Susarla, who has built a customised rental platform enabling us to tailor our service with our own features.  

Together, we’ve created a Minimum Viable Product. Up until now, we’ve only concentrated on renting baby clothes 0-2 years of age, but the potential for renting maternity clothing, children’s clothing (and any clothing come to that) is huge!  Ashwin and I would like to further develop our model and tech, and find ways to recycle clothes and track the impact that our service is having. We think it’s really important that people understand that by changing the way they shop can have a significant positive knock-on effect for the future of our planet.

Through 2022 we hope to raise early-stage seed/growth capital and transition from the MVP stage to a fully functional business model. To do this, we may have to look at changing our CIC status but we don’t want to end up susceptible to having our core values diluted, so we’re looking at a hybrid structure, using a guardian or golden share, and pairing a not-for-profit and a for-profit together. [https://medium.com/planestories/re-balancing-company-ownership-through-guardian-shares-3a4608685d66]

It’s a big ambition but we want to make ‘SuperLooping’ a verb – like Ebaying with a purpose! Thanks to the likes of Ebay, Uber and Airbnb, the sharing economy has become the norm and customers, hungry for new ideas, want to consume more responsibly. 

My thoughts for you, if you’re considering either going into business for the first time or maybe taking Escape The City’s [https://www.escapethecity.org] lead to quit the corporate world and seek purposeful work that matters to you and to the planet – just go for it!

We’re so lucky in Brighton to have the interest and engagement of such a creative community, open to fresh ideas.  We can connect to masses of supportive organisations, like those I mentioned earlier. Our local council is also very keen to make Brighton and Hove a circular economy city and a hotbed for pioneering and game-changing ideas.

So, really…what are you waiting for?  As Sara Osterholzer would say – Let’s Do Good Business!

Written by Jenny Barrett, founder of SuperLooper, who normally lives and works in Hove but at the moment is working remotely from Los Angeles!

https://www.linkedin.com/in/jenny-barrett-b91a70a/

jenny@superlooperlife.com