Meg Pirie In Conversation With Simon Payne, Co-founder Of Sole Responsibility
Source: Sole Responsibility: Co-founder Simon Payne
by Meg Pirie
I first remember reading about Simon Payne, one of the co-founders of Sole Responsibility back in 2020, when he pledged 600 winter coats and jackets to homeless people in Greater Manchester, ensuring that within 24 hours all homeless people in the city and surrounding areas would have a coat by Christmas.
Founded in 2014, Sole Responsibility is a business which buys, repairs and sells seconds and stock with minor damage from some of the UK’s most-known high-street stores, which would otherwise have been destined for landfill or incineration. Now the brand acts as Sustainable Partner to JD Sports, giving their seconds a ‘second-chance’ via resell platform eBay. Last year, JD Sports revealed that Sole Responsibility diverted 49,547 units from landfill or incineration, which for a small team of 8 is no small feat.
Sitting down and talking with Payne, revealed both his despondency for the lack of waste strategy for the fashion sector at present, but also a visceral determination to raise awareness of this. What follows is a conversation about how the brand transpired and suggestions for policy moving forward.
Source: Sole Responsibility: A picture of the team
How did the idea for Sole Responsibility transpire?
When myself and Helen met over 20 years ago we used to go round car boots and markets buying things for our new house together. This then progressed to buying and restoring items from clothing, footwear and even house fittings. After a period of time I left my job as a project manager to try and make a full time job out of it. We could not believe what the general public threw away, so we decided to ‘up our game’ and find out what businesses were doing around waste and anticipated there was a bigger problem going on in the background.
We reached out to people like JD and put a proposal to work with their seconds and returned product. We had a great response from JD and started to work with them across footwear and clothing. As of 2 years ago we were named as a sustainable partner and appear in their Annual Report showing how much we save from landfill.
Our initial goal was to help the fashion industry and provide a solution to brands or retail businesses and that the solution is reselling seconds. We offer traceability and security of product. For the last few years we have been trying to raise the profile of the business and speak to brands and retailers (when they want to speak to us, which in all honesty is a rarity!) and show what is going wrong in the current system. I feel that this will in the end lead to a reduction in production of clothing as a global community – we just produce too much which hugely adds to this problem!
What suppliers are you partnered with and how do they use your services?
We are a Sustainable Partner to JD Sports and work with several other retailers, who at this stage do not want to be named. We take the stock in on a regular basis and we review and triage the stock that we receive into the business. We categorise the stock and then resell it via eBay. Our services also includes specific commercial arrangements around what we can tailor to the retailer.
You have a 10,000 sq ft warehouse in the UK, and not only triage footwear on arrival, but also make sure that the footwear can be resold. What skills are taught to staff to be able to achieve this? How many jobs has this enabled?
As a small business we teach the skills of reuse and repair and this is something that has always been integral to our business. We ensure that all of our staff are cross-trained and that each individual can work across departments and add variety. We currently have 8 staff within the business and are currently in the process of taking more staff into the business.
You support a number of charities, including the Halifax Opportunities Trust – what does this support enable?
Our time with Halifax Opportunities Trust was all about giving work opportunities to those who were unable to get into work and had issues that we could help with. We have over time helped numerous staff. Some have moved on to full-time employment after learning skills with ourselves and several are still working with us after us putting additional time and education developing new skills.
What is your understanding of how footwear is currently recycled in the UK? I understand that subprime, returned or seconds stock is often incinerated, is that right?
This is quite a complex question on so many different levels. In short, I feel that recycling is not able to achieve its full potential due to the initial materials used to create the shoes in the first place. As such as so many different brands and models are made and sold from £5 to £1500 to suit each individual requirement, the material content base is always going to be different. On the lower end the least recyclable materials are used, to appeal to the high volume and low price consumer. But when you look at high price and low volume, more effort can be made to include costlier material, however this is a much smaller part of the problem.
The other issue is what people do with their internals damaged stock and how they get it back out to the consumer (if they want to do that). Most brands work on seasonal drops, new colourways and sell-through rates and as such, old-season damaged stock becomes an issue. Brands need to make products with a view of how it can be broken down at the end-of-life stage before it is even made.
The UK is not including Extended Producer Responsibility (EPR) as part of its waste strategy for the fashion sector at present. What would policies that looked at EPR mean to your business?
My understanding with EPR at this stage is that it is solely concentrating on packaging.
I would like the Government to go down the responsibility route and prevent brands from using landfill – ever. Brands should be made accountable for the initial volume of products produced with justification of why so many items are being produced. For example, should brands be allowed to produce?
Also, potential access to a material allocation every year dependent upon how sustainable the business is across the board, with everything from using the sustainable bank to hitting ESG targets will mean that they are proving themselves responsible enough to produce a higher volume of product and more importantly ensuring that post-sale the product is dealt with correctly and is recycled and not disposed of. For those with a low score of sustainability this would mean the brand would have less access to materials as they would be deemed not responsible. While this might seem quite harsh, as everyone is given free range to materials there is nothing to make the brand responsible for the lifecycle of the material that they purchase.
We agree that more needs to be done in this space. That is why Fashion Roundtable has created two reports, one a Waste Strategy around Extended Producer Responsibility which was presented to DEFRA, and the other on VAT reductions for sustainable businesses on behalf of ACS, which you can read by clicking through.