Last month, the Dutch social enterprise United Repair Centre (URC), which mends clothing from performancewear brands such as Patagonia, Decathlon, Arc’teryx and The North Face, opened its second international outpost in Paris. The 3,000-square-foot hub joins existing URCs in London and Amsterdam, repairing approximately 55,000 items a year for over 35 clothing brands and now employing 51 tailors.
“Paris is a unique opportunity,” explains URC founder Thami Schweichler. “There’s a strong culture for longevity there: France is paving the way on repair legislation, Europe is following, and the world is looking at Europe.”
Clothing repair is a key component of the circular economy — along with rental, resale, and remaking — and more brands are offering it as a service. According to Sarah Robins, textiles and circular economy specialist at the NGO Waste and Resources Action Program (WRAP), “The last couple of years have seen a big drive, with M&S partnering with Sojo, Primark with The Seam, and success stories like URC.”
But repair is operationally complex, with inconsistent volumes, large variability between jobs, and relatively expensive labor. “Repair doesn’t scale with volume,” notes Kirsty Emery-Laws, program manager at the Ellen MacArthur Foundation. “It still takes the same amount of time to change a broken zipper.” Emery-Laws estimates the rise of fashion repair to be in the single-digit percentages. “It’s not the biggest growth area,” she says, “but there’s momentum. As the cost of living increases, it will become the norm, as fewer people can afford to buy new.”
The global repair map
What is required, then, for the business of clothing repair to scale more easily? Could France, with its legislative advances, become the blueprint? France has the most established Extended Producer Responsibility (EPR) policy for textiles. This means brands that sell clothing in France are required to contribute to a fund that extends the product lifecycle and manages end-of-life when it comes. This includes a repair fund, which finances a consumer voucher scheme, giving discounts on services at approved clothing repair partners. France has also approved a lower VAT rate of 5.5% on repair services.
URC is not the only fashion repair service expanding into France. Last summer, London-based Sojo opened a repair store in Paris’s Westfield mall, which is now the business’s “highest performing” Westfield shop, says Sojo founder Josephine Philips (it has two in London, plus a Selfridges concession). Sojo, with its 50 staff, also has a business-to-business (B2B) arm, facilitating fashion repair for 16 brands, including M&S, Arket, Ganni, and Reiss; a consumer repair app with home collectsion and delivery; and is one of France’s 600-plus certified textile repairers. Similarly, London-based Save Your Wardrobe, which provides 18 fashion partners such as Maje, Sandro, and Loro Piana with the tech support, and sometimes tailors, for a fully integrated repair service, opened a Paris office in 2023. On the brand side, Barbour and Veja have launched standalone repair shops in the French capital, in 2023 and 2024, respectively.
The EU, meanwhile, is working toward a 2030 goal for its Textiles Strategy, which includes the Ecodesign for Sustainable Products Regulation (ESPR). Once implemented, this will require new clothing to be repairable (as well as durable and recyclable), and spare parts and repair instructions to be made available. (French consumers already have similar Right to Repair protection across categories including textiles and technology.) Belgium, Sweden, and the Netherlands have reduced VAT on clothing repair, while Latvia and the Netherlands have a textiles EPR, though neither explicitly mandates repair. In North America, California is leading the way, with its EPR program for apparel and textiles due by 2030, but the US lacks a national government scheme around repairs. In South America, Chile expanded its EPR legislation last year to include textiles, though it is focused on end-of-life and reuse, and doesn’t yet support repair.
The UK has no foreseeable regulation nor tax measures supporting clothing repair, but voluntary initiatives are making strides. For example, WRAP’s UK Textiles Pact, an industry agreement to advance circularity, launched in 2021 and has 160 signatories including Primark, Next, and M&S. And in 2024, the Ellen MacArthur Foundation launched The Fashion ReModel, a three-year circular fashion pilot with 13 participants, including Arc’teryx, H&M, and Primark. “We’re caught in an economic trap,” says Emery-Laws, who leads The Fashion ReModel. “The policy landscape favors the linear system, so virgin resource extraction remains relatively cheap, while VAT is placed on every single repair transaction.” The Ellen MacArthur Foundation is working with business leaders to call for policy change.
Finding the right way forward
The fashion repair ecosystem is diverse, with business models ranging from in-store services (for example, at Finisterre, Uniqlo, Toast, and Levi’s), to companies like URC and Sojo providing white-label, end-to-end solutions for brands. Some brands offer free repairs for life, using their own tailors — for example at Toast, “It’s important our repairers understand the brand aesthetic and feel invested in our values,” says head of brand Rosie McKissock. Some operate a hybrid model, with both in-house and third-party repair (for example, Patagonia and Arc’teryx). Meanwhile, some third-party providers are B2B only, such as URC and white-label platforms Mended and Circulo, while Sojo, Save Your Wardrobe, and The Seam have both brand partnerships and consumer-facing services.
“There isn’t one perfect business model,” says Emery-Laws. “It’s about understanding how you build a business case for repair internally, so it sits with your strategy and identity. To scale it, it needs to be embedded into the core business for internal buy-in.” There’s a clear business case for brands, says URC CEO Paul Kerssens. “For warranty, the standard approach is replacement, but repair is less costly, and enables brands to profit from customer loyalty,” he says.
Harnessing a niche can limit variability and ease scale. URC says its focus on performancewear has streamlined its workflow, for example. “The more we create a specialization of certain repair skills, the easier it gets to scale,” says Kerssens.
Sojo, whose revenue from repair and alteration services more than doubled from 2024 to 2025, has not specialized, and works with brands from mass market to luxury. “We’ve discussed narrowing in order to make sales easier, but all brands are looking for a solution — we’ve been driven by market needs,” says Philips. Scalability, she says, comes from “repeatability — standardizing as much as possible is an absolute focus for us. To boost efficiency, we’ve implemented a triage to categorize the same kind of repair to one person in one day.”
But, Philips adds, “software is where the profit lies. The Software as a Service [Saas] model is the high-margin, highly scalable element of the business.” And although URC is not focusing on profitability yet, software “is crucial to scaling”, Kerssens says. (URC is “firmly in the growth phase — revenue is 60% year-on-year”.)
The business case
There are wider commercial benefits to repair. Firstly, it can improve design efficiency, notes Save Your Wardrobe founder Hasna Kourda. “Design teams get feedback on defects, so [garments] break less often — there’s a virtuous feedback loop,” she says. What’s more, Kourda adds, her brand partners “find that repair contributes more consistently to profitability than exchanges and refunds”. (Save Your Wardrobe is on “a clear path for profitability in the next 12 to 18 months”, after nine years in business.) Plus, adds Toast’s McKissock, there’s a “competitive advantage to being ahead of compliance. It gives us the opportunity to innovate, knowing we’ve ticked off the foundational boxes.”
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Not all brands are seeking profitability when it comes to repairs. Primark — now with three UK pilot repair services in-store, in Manchester, Edinburgh, and the London Borough of Bromley — subsidizes the cost. “The cost of repair is a barrier for customers,” says Vicki Swain, Primark’s product longevity lead. Primark intends to “take the learnings and scale”, she says. Similarly for Toast: “Our repair service is a cost we swallow — I’d hope it contributes to a positive view of the brand,” McKissock adds.
For Arc’teryx — who by the end of this year will have 50 in-store ReBird repair centers, after launching the service in 2021 — the mostly free-of-charge initiative is attracting new customers. “It’s become one of our strongest entry points,” says ReBird VP Dominique Showers. And, she adds, “By extending the life of gear, we reduce operational costs and build long‑term value for our guests.”
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For the time being, clothing repair isn’t a high-growth, easily scalable profit driver, but it’s becoming strategically important as regulation tightens (especially in Europe) and consumers shift toward value and longevity. Brands should treat repair as a core, integrated capability that can cut costs, reduce returns, improve design, and build loyalty.
The dream, says URC’s Schweichler, is to have “a global repair infrastructure, working with brands and governments to standardize repair components, process, and costs”. He believes fashion should be viewed “like the car industry”, with a more tightly regulated environmental impact and more mainstream maintenance. “We have a lot of homework in the coming years.”
Correction: URC repairs approximately 55,000 items a year, not 13,000 as a previous version of this article suggested. Thami Schweichler founded the company and Paul Kerssens is the CEO.
