Gonzalo Sáenz, Marta Iglesias and Mónica Rodríguez (co-founders of Recovo) and Clara Méndez.
In recent years, driven by the growing awareness of the environment, projects have emerged that pursue a more sustainable conception of fashion.
And it is precisely this path that Mónica Rodríguez and Marta Iglesias took at the beginning of this year when they founded Recovo, a platform to dispose of surplus fabrics from brands.
The objective of the company founded by these two former Inditex workers is to invoice 220,000 euros and now they are preparing their first round of financing.
"I have been undertaking for a long time," says Rodríguez, a 28-year-old woman from León, on the other end of the phone.
When he was in college, where he studied Marketing and Advertising Communication, he created a fashion brand called DNA that worked with
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fabrics
, inventory that is discarded, such as those that make up the Recovo catalog.
Then he continued his career and joined the Galician household.
"And two years later I had the opportunity to get back into the entrepreneurial world and I jumped in," he says.
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Recycling the clothes we no longer want
Rodríguez was looking for a project that would generate a positive impact. The textile industry is the fourth that exerts the most pressure on the use of raw materials and water and is the fifth with the highest greenhouse gas emissions. And he also saw that there was the problem of waste, so it made sense to go for a circular model and do it in this sector, which he knew well.
“The fashion industry is in full transition and more and more initiatives are being carried out to make it more circular and sustainable, but there was still a lot to do,” says the co-founder. So they got down to business and in May they formed Recovo, which currently has six employees. The operation is simple: surplus brands such as Pronovias, Hemper, Ecoalf or Pyratex are offered on the Recovo platform that buyers access. In it you can find information on quantity, measurements, composition, impact or traceability of each fabric. They have more than 320 references and are divided into three large categories: natural, recycled and synthetic.
"At the beginning we focused on talking with textile manufacturers, not so much on exploring the brands, because we were still preparing everything," he says.
Regarding buyers, Rodríguez points out that they are medium and small companies interested in sustainability, who tend to make capsule collections and do not follow the pattern of two large collections a year.
“These types of brands are both national and international.
In fact, right now 20% of the platform's traffic is Spanish, but the rest international, from countries such as France, Germany, Sweden, the Netherlands… ”, he points out.
"You can buy recycled fabric, organic fabric, but in the end, when you take advantage of what already exists, the impact is zero," says Rodríguez about the interest of producers in
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fabric
.
“It is very gratifying because you see how one brand is taking advantage of the fabrics of another and how in the end we are managing to create a community.
Our main objective is to combat textile waste through community and technology ”.
Among the brands that have already turned to Recovo are Vitamin Sea Barcelona, Lifegist and Otro Studio.
Global vision
"The base is in Spain, but we have a global vision and we are beginning to see that the visits are international, that there are many registered users from northern Europe," says the CEO.
In 2022 they plan to open new markets, but they hope that this trend will already begin to be noticed by the end of this year.
Acceptance, he says, is exceptional: "Many people come up telling us what a good initiative."
For medium and small brands it is more difficult to find suppliers and, once they find them and want to explore sustainable fabrics, access to these types of materials is not easy.
"And an interesting point that we see is that, there is a lot of interest in finding sustainable fabrics and they see that in us."
