Emma hosts Lydia Hartley, the Co-Founder of Continue – a startup enabling fashion brands to adopt circular practices and boost customer retention by powering their own peer-to-peer marketplaces. To date, Continue has partnered with over 30 fashion brands. Previously, Lydia founded Don’t Shop, Swap, a circular fashion tech start-up that gained support from the Techstars London accelerator, where she was the first solo founder accepted. Before her entrepreneurial ventures, she established and led multi-million-pound partnerships at Darktrace, the UK tech unicorn.
The company has prioritised simplifying the journey toward circularity, recognising that many brands and retailers are still daunted by the concept, and the added complexity of integrating technology can make it even more challenging. With her skillset of marketing, fashion, and technology – as well as being a young woman in the UK where overconsumption is particularly problematic – Lydia provides a refreshing perspective on what it will take to scale sustainability.
Lydia and Emma dive deep into why resale is an opportunity not to be missed by brands and retailers, how they can use it as a way of growing their businesses, the way that Continue is working to meaningfully and positively influence consumer culture, and the pragmatic steps that the fashion industry can take to get to a technology-enabled, more sustainable future.
Listen to the full 35-minute show below (or by following The Interline Podcast through your podcast / audio app of choice) and read on for some additional details.
Key talking points from Emma and Lydia’s conversation:
- How should brands be thinking about the opportunity of resale in today’s retail environment?
- The pragmatic approach that brands and retailers can take to use resale as a way of growing their businesses without having one vertical cannibalise the other.
- Whether the wider availability of circular and resale business models is going to meaningfully influence consumer behaviour.
- The approach different generations view sustainability in fashion today and how resale fits into particular demographics.
- The way that technology is playing a role in the advancement of sustainability within the fashion industry, and whether innovation is accessible to everybody.
- How Continue’s technology differs from similar marketplaces, and what impact the company is creating for its brand partners.
- Continue’s wider vision for the future of sustainable fashion, how to reach it, and just how much of that overall picture belongs to resale.
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