Apparel company Uniqlo is stepping up efforts to extend the life of its clothing line by adding four new in-store repair studios in the United States.
Called Re.Uniqlo, the repair stations are located on the New York flagship's retail space on Fifth Avenue, at the Beverly Center in Los Angeles, on State Street in Chicago, and at Disney Springs in Florida. The Soho repair studio, which opened in February 2022, is slated for expansion.
Each repair costs $5. Services offered include re-sewing unraveled seams, sewing on buttons, patching/sewing holes in knitwear such as sweaters, taping or sewing holes or tears in down products, and sewing/patching holes or tears in denim and jeans. Repairs are made by Uniqlo staff in stores, and customized repairs are also made at the request of customers.
According to Jean Shein, Uniqlo global director of sustainability, the U.S. expansion is a direct response to the success of the repair studio in the Soho store.
Extending the Life Cycle of Clothes
To promote a circular economy, this repair workshop grew out of the repair workshop event at the UNIQLO Tauentzien store in Berlin in the fall of 2021. In Berlin, the city cooperates with the Berlin City Mission to support homeless people by providing them with products that have been repaired from defective parts of clothing. At the UNIQLO store on Tauentzien, a repair service was set up in a corner of the store to demonstrate these clothing repairs to customers and employees as a workshop. As a result, the brand developed the idea to launch its "Re: Uniqlo Studios".
UNIQLO then began setting up "Re: Uniqlo Studios" in its newly opened flagship stores in New York's Soho and London's Regent Street last year to extend the life cycle of its beloved clothing. With the four newly opened stores, UNIQLO now offers this repair service in 17 stores in nine countries around the world.
Uniqlo’s Global Plan
Fast Retailing, the parent company of the Uniqlo chain has set "respect for the environment" as one of its priorities to achieve sustainability, so the company is working on reducing any form of waste while managing to establish a business model with minimal impact on the environment.
In July 2019, the company announced its plan to eliminate unnecessary plastic use in its supply chain by the end of 2020 and reduce the single-use plastic it moves to its customers through all stores worldwide by 85 percent. This decision includes shopping bags and product packaging and amounts to around 7,800 tons annually.
By 2021, it stopped using packaging for its slippers in autumn 2021, and it switched to packaging made from recycled plastic for some items. It also reduced the number of hangers, shirt clips, and size labels it uses wherever possible.
New Commitment to Sustainability
The Japanese giant first joined the sustainable trend with a plan to reduce the number of single-use bags in its stores in Europe in 2019. The firm did so by charging 10 euro cents for each bag and the amount raised will be donated in full to the charity: water NGO.
charity:water is a non-profit organization that provides clean drinking water to people in developing countries. One hundred percent of donations fund water projects in Africa and Asia, countries where clean water is a scarce resource.
In addition, all Uniqlo stores in Europe began to offer reusable, eco-friendly canvas bags available in two sizes, as the brand continued to offer the Eco Bag model made from PET bottles for 1.90 euros. The company has also made an effort to begin sourcing sustainable materials, and it currently sources its feathers that carry Responsible Down Standard certification, as well as Supima cotton.