Let's Do a Vibe Check on Trashie, the Clothing Take Back Bag
We just want to offload our old clothing without ruining the world. Is that so hard?
Hello! This article is free, but the Good Reads at the bottom and commenting are only for paid subscribers.
After the Los Angeles fire, used clothing donations poured in to the city. And as in most natural disasters, there was way too much.
Too many stained and torn pieces of old clothing that no one would ever want to wear. Too much clothing that wasn’t appropriate for displaced families. Too much of everything! Even after the clothing was sorted into care packages by size, gender, and type, there were mountains more. 123,000 pounds more.
People wanted to help. But more than that (let’s be honest) they wanted to offload their trash bags of old clothing somewhere and not feel guilty about it.
Last month, about 100 volunteers showed up to help Trashie load 23,000 pounds of clothing from the Santa Anita Park pop-up donation center into a truck bound for Texas. They did it again at the beginning of February for 50,000 pounds of clothing. If the company hadn’t stepped in, those donations likely would have ended up moldering in a warehouse and/or in the local landfill.
This is not that abnormal for Trashie, a company which invites people across the U.S. to clean out their closets and ship it bags of old clothing they don’t want, guilt free. Normally, it handles 80,000 pounds of clothing a week, and last year it sorted through 4.5 million pounds of textiles.
You might have seen its ads all over social media. You pay $20 for a bag, fill it, and ship it in. Trashie promises to responsibly recycle your old clothes, and you get rewards from companies ranging from Uber Eats to 1-800 Flowers and Old Navy.
A for-profit company that does good for the world! Love. But not everyone is convinced.
So today we’re deep diving into Trashie: what it is, where it came from, how it works, whether it can truly absolve us of our fast-fashion sins, and if it’s the solution for your own old-clothing angst.
The Circularity Holy Grail
Trashie’s story starts in 2018, in the heady days of “conscious consumerism.” Back then, in survey after survey, shoppers claimed that they would pay more for sustainable fashion. And we believed them!
Two years earlier Kristy Caylor had left Maiyet, the conscious luxury brand she had co-founded, when it was turned into a members space in London. (RIP: I still wear my Maiyet leather boots.) She was part of the fashion working group at the circular economy advocacy nonprofit Cradle to Cradle, and worked with the World Economic Forum imagining better future business models for fashion.
Maybe, she thought, recycled and recyclable t-shirts would be the thing to monetize this growing environmental awareness. So, she raised $2.8 million in VC funding and proudly claimed the mantle of the first circular fashion brand.
As a subscription service, For Days' offer to conscious consumers was simple: buy the eco-friendly t-shirts, wear them out, return them to be recycled into new For Days products, and help solve fashion's waste problem.
“We tackled it with…I don't want to say a naive lens, but kind of, because I was like, we're going to create the perfect system, it's going to be amazing,” she told me in 2024. “And it's going to take over the world.”
For Days designed all of its clothing to be recyclable: pure, 100% cotton (even the tags and thread!) with water soluble ink. The company made it easy to send back your old For Days clothing, and it took a year and a half to fill a shipping container with enough worn-out cotton For Days clothing to ship it all to a mechanical recycler. That recycled cotton textile was then put into new For Days products.
But then Caylor realized that the problem was bigger than one brand. "People were happy to recycle their t-shirts, but they had a giant pile of product that they didn't know what to do with. What if we could build a supply chain that could handle the problem of fashion waste more generally?"
So in 2020, For Days launched its Take Back Bag. Customers could purchase it for $20, fill it with up to 15 pounds of clothing from any brand in any condition, ship it to For Days for recycling, and receive a $20 credit to use at For Days on high-quality sweats, tees, and other basics.
As I've written before, the secondhand fashion market is broken. With ultra-fast fashion brands like Shein and Temu, plus the OGs Walmart and Zara, all pumping out ever cheaper crap clothing, it now costs more to collect, sort, and resell clothing than it does to manufacture it new. Almost every piece of fashion created today will end up in the landfill, in an incinerator, or in the environment, such as beaches in Ghana, and Chile's Atacama desert.
A lot of Americans know this, but struggle to find the “correct” way to offload their old clothes. In this environment, the Take Back Bag was a godsend.
“When we launched the Take Back Bag and started taking everything, it was overwhelming,” Caylor says. “I was renting containers to put in the parking lot to put the product in. It was really then that I realized the scope of the problem. It was so much even bigger than I had realized.”
I really liked For Days, its products, and the Take Back bag. As I type this, I’m wearing an old For Days matching quilted cotton sweatpants and hoodie set. In my NYC ladies chat, I often recommended the Take Back Bag to women who wondered what to do with old clothing they couldn’t sell or felt bad donating because it wasn’t in great condition.
For Days started building out its infrastructure, partnering with a sort and grade facility in Texas and a second facility in Juarez, Mexico. It developed a system where clothing is sorted into 13 or 14 main categories, such as women's and men's summer, women's winter coats, kids, Christmas, and vintage. Those are then sorted into more refined categories—253 in all—like women’s jeans with holes in them, cashmere sweaters, and acrylic sweaters. Some of those items are shipped abroad for resale. Others are downcycled into shoddy for insulation or furniture stuffing.
Somebody, Anybody, Please Take My Old Clothes
Caylor was starting to see the limitations of the original business model, which was selling recyclable fashion products. “How many 100% cotton products do people want?” Caylor says. “Are they willing to pay more? No.”
The real business seemed to be in taking back old clothing. Many small-to-midsize brands wanted to become circular, but the reverse logistics—on top of running a fashion brand—was almost impossible to pull off on their own. One small eco-friendly fashion brand owner said services like SuperCircle and TerraCycle charged a monthly fee that started at around $1,000, and she would still have to pay for shipping on top.
So in 2022, For Days created a marketplace of sustainable brands, and allowed them to plug into its circular system. The brands would purchase the Take Back Bags to sell to their customers, and then their customers could use the rewards on any of the brands in the marketplace. For Days took care of the physical fashion sorting.
“They were great to work with. They did a photo shoot with my products, and promoted it on their email and Instagram,” a small brand owner who joined in early 2023 told me. For Days drove between $2,000 and $3,000 in sales the first few months, which was significant for a small business like hers.
In early 2023, For Days quietly abandoned making its own product.
Some consumers were sending in several bags and then stacking the rewards to pay for an entire $80 product, for example. Now, in a move meant to protect the small brand partners, customers could only use one $20 reward at a time. Which was frustrating, because nothing in the marketplace was less than $20. Plus, the website was glitchy and customer service…well, it sucked.
Starting in the fall, payments from For Days to the small brands started coming in later and later, while sales through the website dropped. Another fashion brand owner said For Days would owe her between $5,000 and $10,000 for months at a time. When she started Googling, she came across reams of bad reviews on TrustPilot and Reddit, and upset customers commenting on their social media.
“There was a couple of posts where their social media person was just responding really sarcastically. I was just like, oh my gosh, who am I working with? I thought this is a totally different vibe.”
She was so embarrassed she ended up taking the Take Back Bags off her site. “It's like, okay, we get it. Sometimes you're a brand, you pivot, you try something new. It's a little chaotic. But just acknowledge that and be transparent and apologize.”
When asked about this chaotic period, Caylor says they were surprised by how popular the Take Back Bag was, and struggled to keep up with customer service requests. Plus, it was a minority that was stacking coupons, but they were a vocal minority, and very upset. Now, you can use your Trashie Cash on up to 50% of the price of a product on the For Days marketplace.
She also says that she has no knowledge of the late payments to small brands.
Eventually, after a lot of back and forth, the small brand owners did get paid. The For Days marketplace, meanwhile, hasn’t been updated in a year.
Caylor was moving on. At the beginning of 2024, she launched an entirely new business based on her experience with For Days: Trashie.
The Next Pivot…to Scale
The Take Back Bag still exists, but now Trashie partners with companies that have large marketing and acquisition budgets, like DoorDash, Regal Cinema, and Uber Eats. These companies in turn offer deals on Trashie’s website in exchange for Trashie Cash.
Essentially, these corporations are doing the same thing as when they send you a glossy coupon in the mail for a discount off your first order, but through Trashie. Ideally, you see the whole process of offloading your clothing as free, or even a net benefit.
But…customers haven’t always seen it that way. A few critiques have come up.
Critique 1: It’s a scam.
Many have pointed out that in exchange for shipping in clothing, the discounts aren’t any better than what you can get from those same companies just for existing. Although Trashie has raised the rewards for one $20 bag to 30 in Trashie Cash, it’s hard to say what that is actually worth, with all the different deals available on the website. And some people say they’ve struggled to redeem their Trashie Cash at all.
Still, you can’t knock the mindset shift that Trashie is creating. It used to be that consumers thought their old clothes were valuable; that when they donated them, they were bestowing a gift upon poor people.
That hasn’t been the reality for at least a decade. Trashie has found a way to get people to pay the actual cost of responsibly sorting through our mountains of used clothing. Which apparently costs $20 per 15 pounds of stuff.
Critique 2: Isn’t this just encouraging more consumption?
What is so sustainable about UberEats, Sephora, or Walmart?
To this, Caylor says she doesn’t want to limit Trashie to the hardcore greenies. “There are people who are really interested in that sustainable discovery. And then there's a larger group of people who don't care as much about that and just want to order dinner on DoorDash. So we have to build rewards that speak to them. If we forced them into kind of a more curated sustainable marketplace, we'll just limit the impact we have, because people won't find what they want.”
Critique 3: Can we trust that Trashie is actually recycling clothing?
Trashie has been pretty transparent about what exactly it does with clothes. But the public’s perception of what’s possible when it comes to fashion recycling, and what is actually possible, are very far apart.
Fashion recycling technology is hyped but functionally non-existent. According to a recent report, just 0.3% of materials used in fashion are from recycled sources, and of that, it's water bottles, not textiles. All those startups that recycle textiles into textiles? One went bankrupt. The others are struggling to raise enough funds to build their pilot and demo plants. Some might succeed, but they’re years away. Trashie simply can’t recycle everything it receives. So, it has to downcycle and resell. That leads me to the next critique…
Critique 4: Trashie ships used clothing abroad.
The entire global industry of resale has been marred by scenes of mountains of old clothing, often burning, from Ghana and Chile. But Caylor distinguishes the careful sorting Trashie does from the conventional used clothing collections.
According to Caylor, what is stuffed in street-side bins and fails to sell at charity shops is sorted into two or three rough grades and shipped abroad as mystery bales. “The person receiving has no way to know what they're getting,” she says. So when a Ghanaian reseller, for example, buys a bale, they take what they think they can sell and dump the rest.
In contrast, because Trashie does such a fine-tuned sort, retailers can put in orders for exactly what they want. For example: an Eastern European retailer can order a bale of used children’s winter coats to arrive in November. Or rural retailer in Asia can order long-sleeved cotton t-shirts for farm workers.
“We don't ship any mixed rags,” she says.
Critique 5: Is it really sustainable to ship used clothing in plastic bags to another state, when you could just drop it all at a local charity shop?
To this, Caylor says Trashie is currently vetting new sorting facilities on the East Coast and the center of the country, to shorten the shipping distance. And again, about 80% of what people donate to thrift shops doesn’t sell, and is sent to sorters anyway, who then ship it abroad. So, same same?
My Conclusion
So, should you buy a Trashie bag? Honestly, that’s completely up to you.
“I mean, I am rooting for them,” says one of small fashion brand owners that quit the marketplace. “I want this to work. I think it's unfortunate that like small businesses like myself get caught in the middle.”
If you really do want to do a closet clean out, you don’t have a convenient way to bring your stuff to a thrift shop, and you see some businesses on Trashie that you like, then Trashie could be a good choice for you. It truly is the most convenient option. And if you’re anywhere near Texas, it might even be sustainable.
Me? I’m a local thrifter. I bring stuff to donate that I could probably sell, knowing that helps pay the salaries of people who need jobs (in the case of Goodwill). While I’m there, I like finding vintage stuff that I know comes from the local community. I also own a car, which helps.
Still, after reporting this story, I might sort my cast-offs in to two piles: likely to sell at the thrift shop, and lower quality stuff to send to Trashie. I might never even use the rewards. I just think it’s worth $20 to get this stuff out of my house and to the correct location, without dumping it on a charity to deal with, or in the trash. Trashie even has a Tech Take Back Box now.
Really, the most sustainable solution would be for the government to subsidize large-scale, public solutions, instead of hoping the private industry can somehow make this garbage fire of an industry work. That is looking increasingly unlikely, at least in the US.
Do what you need to do, and don’t feel like you need to be a purist about it. We’re all —you, me, small sustainable brands, Trashie—doing the best we can in a fucked up system.
But if you want another reason to go on a shopping fast, well, that seems to be the best solution of all.
Have you used Trashie? What has your experience been like?