Hey, welcome back to The Interline Podcast. We’ve had a lot of technology executives on the show lately, and we have another tech CEO next week. So today we’re going for a change of pace, and I mean that in a bunch of ways. My guest for the show is Rosie McKissock, who’s brand director for TOAST, a brand that prides itself on two things: designing for longevity and operating with a rigorously documented social conscience.
Thematically and practically, both of those lend themselves to a slower, more deliberate and more holistically aware approach to fashion than the one we’ve ended up talking about a lot here recently, where AI is promising to kick everything into a massively higher gear.
Now, I can promise you the brand and the assortment you’re picturing when I use words like slow and holistic are probably quite close to what TOAST, which is a Welsh company founded in the late nineties, offers across womenswear, menswear and home. Think campaigns in farmland locations with earthy, sustainably sourced knitwear and loose cuts, or campaigns in the kinds of neighbourhoods in London and San Francisco where people dress as though they might be about to read Walden or Pilgrim at Tinker Creek to you.
I’m being a bit cheeky there, but I’m kind of poking fun at myself. You’re listening to a guy who lives in the countryside, who owns a chainsaw and has more than my share of fleeces and hiking boots. I hate to dispel the mystique that this show is recorded in some kind of gleaming studio in the city, but most episodes, this one included, are taped from my house, and there are usually horses visible outside the window. One time, I nearly ran over a deer coming up the road. I’m trying to put you in the right aesthetic frame of mind here, right?
But for all that connectivity to the land, to traditional craft and natural materials, there’s really a lot of technology, governance, process and operational analysis in today’s episode. TOAST publishes an annual Social Conscience Report that’s full of claims like, quote, “99% of our 2025 clothing collections were made from solely natural fibres or cellulosic fibres from certified sources”, and, “We work with external auditors because we believe in holding ourselves and our business accountable and offering transparency to our customers.” These are not claims that you can just make without having the data and the systems to back them up.
TOAST works with Segura, which you may have heard of, on granular global supply chain mapping and transparency. Their TOAST Circle programme of renew, repair and exchange, which they say has kept more than 25,000 pieces in circulation, is run on software from Circulo, which they use to coordinate the extended post-purchase and end-of-life journey. And like any brand, they have to introduce newness, but they’re having to do it within a much narrower envelope because of their commitment to preferred materials, which leads to some process and design development ingenuity.
And we’re not leaving more frontier tech off the table today either. If you’re a regular listener, you’ll know that I’ve recently shifted to doing more and more of my everyday work in Codex, the desktop app from OpenAI. This has been a change for me as the last holdout here at The Interline who insisted on running things like Slack as desktop apps rather than browser tabs. But the appeal of having multiple browser windows, Markdown files, AI chat, etc., all running in a single dual-pane application was strong, and I’m getting a lot out of working that way.
That sounds like a digression, but actually it’s relevant because, in the process of researching this week’s show inside Codex, I discovered that the TOAST website exposed a bunch of AI agent tools through WebMCP, which Codex flags up to you. Not really what you’d expect for this kind of brand necessarily. So I’m really curious to see where that came from, and I want to know what it can tell us about the parts of technology, particularly in selling, that companies consider to be essential.
And needless to say, I want to use that as a jumping-off point to ask Rosie whether TOAST would generate any PDP or campaign images, and if not, whether the objection there would be environmental, ethical or both. So, yeah, a different kind of pace and a different lens today, but we’re still walking in the same tracks we usually do on The Interline Podcast. They’re just a bit muddier, and somebody probably drove a Land Rover through them this morning. Let’s get into my chat with Rosie.
NB. The transcript below has been lightly edited.
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Okay. Rosie McKissock, welcome to The Interline Podcast.
Thank you very much. Lovely to be here.
Lovely to have you. It’s nice to have a brand on. We’ve had a spate of technology executives recently, so it’s nice to have somebody from the other side of the aisle. Now, to that end, we always start the show with two things: we take a look at what the guest’s day-to-day job is, and then we ask them to define something. We’ll start with your job.
If you worked for a different type of business, i.e. not a brand, I think I’d maybe have an easier time instinctively understanding what a brand director does. I can understand that for a technology company. I can understand that for some other roles. For TOAST, it seems like the brand and the communication around the product is synonymous with everything that goes into the product and everything that happens around it as well. It sounds like quite a holistic role, for want of a better word.
Tell me how much of your time in an average week is spent on telling the TOAST story versus how much of it goes into letting that story influence the product, the supply chain, the sustainability and everything else.
Well, I think it’s a really interesting observation around the idea of what a brand director does for a brand like TOAST. Because I think TOAST is, as a brand — and it’s more than a clothing brand, I would say — very much rooted in craftsmanship, timeless design, community and this more thoughtful way of living. So, as you say, quite a holistic proposition.
I’ve been with TOAST two years, and my first observation was also how singularly the brand was understood and communicated by both the internal teams and also people outside the brand: customers, industry peers and press. I think my role really is about being a custodian of all those touchpoints outside of product. So if product is the bit of the brand that you take home, my role is really about being responsible for the experience of the brand beyond that, making sure that it’s consistently felt and understood.
Just for the benefit of anybody unfamiliar with this specific interpretation of a brand director, my role covers our marketing and our brand creative teams, but also e-commerce, social conscience and customer service. So it is working across those teams to deliver this very rich and textured experience of TOAST.
Thinking then about your point around how much time is spent telling the story, I suppose, and letting that story influence the product: internally, I think it’s more a question of ensuring that we’re putting our decision-making through that brand filter. So do the decisions that we’re making ladder up to the brand promise that we’ve made to ourselves and to our customers? And that, I would say, probably is a big portion of my time: reviewing projects, reviewing assets with the teams through that lens so that we keep things consistent and we keep them all moving forward.
Externally, though, I think it’s a slightly different emphasis. A huge portion of my time in my external dealings with people across different parts of the industry, customers, etc., is focused on telling that TOAST story. While it’s very well understood internally, we do also have an exceptionally high level of customer engagement with the people that know us.
I suppose even in the UK, which is our most mature market, we still feel there’s this huge opportunity to increase engagement, reach more people who share the values of the brand but perhaps haven’t come across us yet. So telling that story in the UK is very important from an engagement point of view. And then over the last few years, we’ve been looking at growth, and our big focus growth market is the US, which is actually where I am today. We’ve been opening stores in the US off the back of a successful growth period in our online business. Obviously, being a smaller fish in that US pond does demand quite regular storytelling.
How do you approach internationalising that story? Because I’m curious about this. I have a friend who runs a menswear brand, and he and his co-founder did a whole “Let’s go to America and let’s see how well the brand that we’ve built, the promise and the product resonates with American audiences.”
I’m just curious: is it the same story? Does it change in the telling? When you take something like that internationally, something that is rooted in craft and maturity in a particular region, I guess I’m curious to see how that changes how you talk about it.
Well, actually, we’ve found that it doesn’t change a great deal. TOAST is a very thoughtful brand. We don’t tend to be, I suppose, reactive in the traditional sense. So we built our online community for five or six years before we even opened a store here. That online proposition was extremely consistent across all of our markets, whether that’s UK, US, whether that’s into Europe or even Asia. People were starting to build a connection with the brand on the same basis that they were in the UK, which is great.
When we started to open stores, we already had these inbuilt communities who had this consistent understanding. I would say our demographic, if you like, is very values-orientated as opposed to gender or age or anything like that. It tends to be very much a case of shared values, which does allow you to be very consistent, I think, in the way that you present the brand. And even in terms of the products, our bestsellers in one market are typically the bestsellers in another market. We don’t see nearly the variation, I think, that other brands do in that sense either.
Interesting. Let’s talk about those values and what you mean by social conscience. We’re used to thinking about individual conscience, right? We’re used to people understanding that actions they take affect other people. We’re also used to talking — or some of us are, I can’t speak for all politicians — about collective action problems that require people to align their individual incentives to solve something bigger.
What does it mean for a brand to have a social conscience and to be an actor in that regard? The uncharitable, cynical read would be: how much of a conscience can you really have? How much influence, and how much can you really solve about society by selling products? But a more favourable one would be: hey, maybe you can make a difference there, and you can change some of the prevailing conditions of an industry that has a long way to go when it comes to managing its impact on planet and people and taking account of how it affects society.
And then there’s the extra wrinkle: the social side of sustainability. A lot of brands talk about being sustainable, and that usually just means environmentally conscious rather than socially conscious. So the social side plays second fiddle to a lot of that, whereas you’re putting it first. Help me understand the distinction and what you mean by social conscience.
Going back to your first point, the distinction between social conscience for you or I as an individual versus any brand: I think for a brand to have a social conscience, it’s about recognising the business that you’re in. We do make and sell products. However, the function of having a social conscience, if you like, is to ensure that, in the process of doing so, you’re trying to minimise your negative impact.
I’m not sure that our goal is to influence or solve all the problems of society, for example, but it would be nice to think that we could model a way of operating a commercially successful business that also sets ambitious standards about the way that it works, with a view to influencing peer brands, encouraging customers to make maybe different choices about where, when and how they shop. And honestly, I do think we talk a lot internally about how we can help to inspire that next generation of creatives and business leaders when they pick up the baton. We should all aspire to leave things better than we find them. I think that’s what we mean, really, when we talk about social conscience.
I think that’s a good answer. Just to pick up on one thing that you mentioned there: a commercially successful brand with a social conscience. I think a lot of people see those as maybe not oxymoronic necessarily, but a lot of people would say you can be sustainable, values-driven, active in areas, or you can be commercially successful, and the two exist in some kind of tension with one another.
I’m guessing you’ve not seen that, and you see that you can be commercially successful and have a social conscience. Just give me a brass-tacks answer. Is it a profitable brand that is also socially driven?
Absolutely.
Perfect. Carry on then. That’s all I wanted to ask.
I think it’s interesting that you also made a point around one element playing second fiddle to the other. I think we don’t see it necessarily that way. We want to do what we can to protect the long-term health of the planet in the same way that we want to champion the wellbeing of those who live on it. That point around social conscience in terms of environment, and the point around social conscience in terms of people and society, I do think go hand in hand.
When you talk about being commercially successful, I think often when industry or brands are talking about sustainability per se, they do typically gravitate towards things like materials and process, which do have a specific impact on product costs. Of course those things are really important. It’s fundamentally essential to understand what the physical act of manufacturing does. But I think it’s also about focusing on community.
We do a lot of work both in terms of the people that create the products, but also initiatives that are not profit-driven, where we are not making a commercial gain. We have a programme called New Makers, for example. Every year we receive a number of applications. We pick a handful, five typically, of people who are at the beginning of this creative career, if you like. And we work with them, we mentor them, we give them a platform, we support them in developing whatever their ambitions are.
Social conscience is so much bigger than this point just around environmental impact. I think that’s also why, if you’re looking at all of those different bits, it becomes part of the whole value chain, if you like. And that does allow you to be, I think, much more commercially successful because it’s baked into the way that the brand exists in every single facet.
I think that’s right, because you do hear big brands in particular say, “Okay, let’s do a sustainable collection.” But that doesn’t make it part of the institution, that doesn’t make it part of their operations, it doesn’t align the incentives the same way that you’ve just described.
No.
And it means—
That you become so focused on the P&L impact: it would be cheaper if we didn’t use organic something or certified something else. I think it has to be a much bigger conversation and a much bigger part of your value system as an organisation. Otherwise it does become a conversation around cost, and I think that devalues the benefit of really investing in that.
Yep, I think that’s correct. You talked about the brand promise and the product promise before. You talked about building products to last. In principle, I think everybody agrees that that’s a good thing. I think that has two elements to it.
It has a design component in the sense that if you’re creating something to last, it needs to be timeless rather than of the moment or anchored to a particular short-term fad or trend. And it also needs to be durable. It needs to last: the construction, the materials and so on. It’s something that needs to be around in a pure existence context and in a “This is still something that I want to wear and want to be seen wearing” context.
Tell me what it means practically to do both of those things through design, development, consumer testing and the brand story. And tell me how you bundle both of those bits up into that promise to the consumer.
Well, circularity starts at the design stage for us, so it’s considered through all the materials, the pattern, the construction, where a garment is made and how it’s going to actually be used. But I think fundamentally some of this goes back to the point you made in your very first question around the identity of the brand.
The identity of the brand is so distinctly felt that the way the design team approach the collection is always through that TOAST aesthetic and a seasonal concept that they develop in-house, rather than fashion trends. So you’re immediately outside of that, “Oh my God, it’s this this season, it’s something else next season.” And that distinctive brand aesthetic has a real ease and functionality to it. That means it doesn’t necessarily age or date in the way that a trend-led proposition would.
We do a lot of community events where our customers will come and join us, and often they will come in their oldest pieces to demonstrate the connection to the brand over time. They’re still wearing them with real pride and often have been through multiple repairs and regeneration over time as well.
On the point around durability, though, I think that’s very much about understanding the properties of the materials that we use. The choices we make are very much guided by a desire to use natural fibres wherever possible. We do product testing, of course, and typically we do prefer materials that age beautifully. I think how natural materials respond to time and wear is really part of what makes the materials so special, but also the clothing. So we make a virtue out of that, I think, in our commitment to the customers. Natural materials will evolve in a way that man-made ones don’t.
Where we go outside of that framework, we would only ever do it to improve the durability of a product. This does tend to be more specifically around components like buttons and zips, things like that. They would be areas where we aren’t necessarily using the same sort of natural fibres. And we would look for options there that have the lightest impact, so recycled, for example.
Yeah. There are only so many places you can get zippers and pullers realistically as well. It’s a fairly consolidated supply chain. You just mentioned the material stuff. Your Social Conscience Report uses the phrase “preferred materials”, which a lot of reports do. That’s accepted industry lexicon. It can mean something different to every company, right? The reason you prefer one material over another can be, as you just said, performance-driven, durability-driven, it can be impact-driven and so on. Your specific criteria, on top of the ones you just talked about, favour organic, regenerative, recycled natural fibres and so on.
It’s no secret that even though that phrase means something different to every brand, there’s still broadly, on aggregate, a delta between fashion’s demand for preferred materials and availability and the actual global supply. So walk me through how you make sure you can back up that product promise and ensure consistent performance with the availability of the materials you need to keep that.
Because it’s one thing to say, “Okay, we work with a lot of synthetics.” Fossil-derived synthetics make up something like 60 to 70% of all new textile development or something in a given period, which definitionally means you are sourcing outside the mainstream, and you’re sourcing outside the mainstream as demand is increasing. How do you make sure that you can secure those inputs and continue to keep that promise over time?
Well, I have to say all credit to our production and design teams here. They are really rigorous in their selection and actually have spent a long period of time developing a really tight library, both of materials and suppliers, that cover a large portion of our collection. We trust and work with those suppliers to deliver each season, which means we are able to secure the base material for the majority of the collection in a fairly consistent way.
We don’t really proliferate unnecessarily into lots of different versions of things. We do innovate, but we also have this core base of fabrics and components, so you have a level of confidence in terms of knowing what we’re going to be delivering. And that also gives the team the headspace to innovate with real intention. Where they are bringing something new in, it’s for a specific purpose, and we’re able to forecast and project that a little bit more specifically. That means we don’t have to change everything every season. For a lot of suppliers, that consistency and that predictability makes us, I think, a good partner.
We also work very much on a buy-now, wear-now model. We’re able to phase our orders and shipments to align to monthly drops, so that means we can nuance a little bit and avoid ordering more than we need to. Our nightmare scenario would always be to end up with unwanted product. We don’t want people to buy more things; we want more people to make good choices in the things that they do buy. So we try to be as effective as we can at that prediction, and I think that’s an important part of it too.
Cool. When you think about the values and the material supply you’ve talked about, I’m keen to learn a little bit about how you approach product innovation. I’m sure you do end up using some synthetic fibres from time to time, but you’re mostly operating in a pretty narrow envelope for what you can bring in as an input for new ideas, especially when you have to minimise the amount of preferred materials that you’re wasting in the development process.
Unlike somebody who’s working with predominantly high-availability synthetics, where you can do multiple rounds of sampling and have fairly high fabric waste and low utilisation and yield if you feel like it, that doesn’t apply to the model you have here. How do you approach this? And do you already, or would you think about, developing new ideas virtually in 3D, for instance, or maybe even virtualising some part of garment testing so that you reduce the potential wastage of preferred materials in the innovation and development process?
Yeah, I don’t think we’re necessarily against that. I think there is always a point, particularly with the type of materials that we use, where you need to see something on a body. You’re going to need to see it physically. But I don’t think we’re against the idea of finding those new efficient ways, particularly at the beginning of the process.
We have done quite a lot of work in terms of design development and pattern exploration, and how we’re more effective there to reduce our sampling of materials at an early stage of the work. If we were looking to introduce more technology, that would be the stage at which that would be most relevant. Later on, as I say, you do get to a point where you need a prototype.
Innovation can take many forms. I think often the industry, probably driven by the sports industry, has convinced us that it always needs to be technology-related. I just don’t think that’s the case. Innovation should be about adding real value. And sometimes really what you need is just newness as opposed to true innovation.
There are a few areas where we seek to innovate on products. We are looking at fabrications, although, as you rightly say, it is within some fairly tight parameters. Of course suppliers are doing interesting things, particularly bio-based materials: really interesting things that do pop up from time to time. We’re testing those and figuring out what’s scalable and what’s not. But we don’t like to take on too many at once. I think we’re very tactical about it. We’d rather do one thing well, really land it, than keep throwing new things out there just to see what happens.
And does that newness tend to be led by material availability in an inventory, or is it led more by, “Okay, we have an idea for a new silhouette, we have an idea for a new category,” or something along those lines?
A bit of both, I think. Sometimes, over the last few years, there’s been so much upheaval globally. Even just the impact on shipping, we’ve had so many challenges over the last few years. So looking at a supplier in a different region that can produce something that you used to buy somewhere else, there’s some of that. But then, yeah, sometimes it is genuinely about, “Oh my goodness, we’d like to create a product like this. How could we do it?”
I suppose the other area from a product point of view where we look to innovate is really on craft techniques. I question, as I say it, whether the word innovation is right there, just in the sense that typically we’re most interested in traditional techniques. They’re innovative in the sense that they’re not always things that are accessible to mass market, but they are actually very traditional in terms of the way that they operate. We have a number of techniques that we go back to time and time again.
But we do find that craft area, which a lot of brands would consider too complex or too expensive potentially to include in their collections, is an area where we get an incredible return on investment because our customers really love those pieces where the process can be discerned in the product that they wear.
The other area of innovation, if you’ll indulge me, is through the lens of collaboration. So what would a third party do to that TOAST brand elastic? An example of this: we have a collection, we started doing this really last year, as an extension of TOAST Circle, which is our circularity proposition. This particular component is called Renewed By, where we invite a designer to reimagine a capsule collection using garments and fabrics that we couldn’t use ourselves elsewhere. That typically brings quite a fresh take on the brand that I think I would consider to be quite innovative.
Innovation also exists in our service propositions. TOAST Circle, for people not familiar with it, covers a number of different circularity initiatives. From our repair service, which is a free service that we offer; exchange events, where people can bring in pieces that they don’t want and switch them; we have Reworn, which is pieces that are donated to us, we repair them and then we can sell them back; and then Renewed, which is reimagining pieces that maybe were rejected for quality reasons or whatever.
That whole process we’ve actually just spent the last year digitising with a tech partner called Circulo. I think this is a special, really unique customer experience that is going to help us unlock so much more for our customers through CRM. Everything there was previously done on paper. That’s been quite an exciting development and, beyond just the products that we make, feels like a really innovative move for TOAST.
I think that’s right. We’re familiar with Circulo, we’ve come across them before. I agree: the innovation in the customer-facing proposition as much as the product proposition is important.
I think one of the realities of operating with a social conscience is that sometimes you have to accept the limits of it, or how far it can go in terms of being supported or not by the infrastructure that exists. I read through your Social Conscience Report for 2025, and you have an example of that in a direct-to-farm cotton pilot that worked, but that you’re not intending to repeat because it couldn’t really scale.
Probably about this time last year, I had a similar conversation with the founder of menswear brand Neem London, a guy called Nick Reed. He piloted a full made-in-the-UK collection, and it got to market, but ended up saying he wouldn’t do it again because the volumes a small brand needed to make it viable were impractical. And then he found that there just wasn’t the manufacturer, material supplier support available in the UK to make it work.
What do you think would need to change for some of these kinds of pilots, some of these full end-to-end observable things, to be more viable? And do you think maybe novel materials, new fibres, some of those kinds of innovations could close some of the gap?
Well, my view on pilots is that they won’t always work. I think certainly there are infrastructure challenges, particularly around circularity. But pilots really, for me, should open up an industry discussion. What would need to be true for this to be successful? Who else would benefit? How can we challenge that? How can we create those conditions?
From our point of view, we’re not interested in only presenting the things that work. There is a level of transparency required in terms of the things that fail as well. Because the likelihood is, if something works, it will be adopted more broadly anyway. Brilliant. You look around the industry, you see somebody else doing something, think that looks interesting, and if it’s successful, you can jump on the bandwagon. The real challenge is when things fail. It should be about challenging the status quo.
However, in the short term, you’re also right. Having clear principles — we are a very values-led organisation — means that sometimes you’re saying no to something as often as you’re saying yes because it just doesn’t make sense at that moment in time. And I think that’s okay.
I think that’s a good attitude to take to it. You talked about the things that did work, or that sound like they worked. The projects you’ve done with Segura, who, again, we’re familiar with, seem to have brought more of your supply chain into view. And by more of your supply chain, I mean the multi-tier supply chain.
I can see the value of having that information because it’s something the majority of brands do not have. I think it’s fair to say that, on aggregate, your typical fashion brand has limited visibility beyond its tier-one production partners and potentially its tier-two material supply partners and so on. That kind of visibility, though, can also end up revealing less savoury things. It can reveal something that complicates a material choice, a deadline or commercial relationship. You turn over a rock, you don’t always like what you find, essentially.
I’m interested, for the holistic, values-driven brand that TOAST is: what does it mean to you to build a culture that can act on the things you find, instead of just nodding in the direction of the bad ones and going, “Okay, we found something positive here, let’s disclose around it”?
If somebody flags up a problem in that multi-tier supply chain, you have to give them the knowledge and the authority to change the plan. And you have to give them support when, as you said before, it can’t just be cost-driven. If somebody finds a potential better alternative or a drawback, you have to have a culture that’s willing to go, “We will accept some degree of compromise in our margin in order to improve some other element of the product promise here.”
Thinking from that holistic brand point of view, how do you build that culture? How do you get to that place where you can say, “We’re going to find out some stuff, and whether we like it or not, we have the culture to act on it”?
We talked a little bit at the beginning of this conversation about the community element of the value system at TOAST. You do find problems, and that’s the point of the transparency, that’s the point of working with a partner like Segura. It’d be nice to think that everything was absolutely perfect and you could just tick all your boxes and move along. But of course there are instances where things are not as you would want to find them.
Because of the community-first value system, off the top of my head, I can’t think of an instance where we’ve been like, “Oh my gosh, this supplier is not doing all the things that we would expect them to be doing, therefore we’re just going to walk away.” I think typically what we would do is work with them to get them to a place where things are as you would want to find them.
I’m trying to think of the name of the conference. I went to a big sustainability conference in Amsterdam a couple of years ago and had this really fascinating conversation around audits, what is the purpose of an audit and the corrective measures, and just how important it is not to walk away when something’s wrong. Actually, the most responsible thing you can do as a business is to try and fix the problem. Otherwise somebody else is going to go into that supplier, and things might not be as they should be, and they might not feel compelled to address it or leave. So it just sustains the problem.
I do think some of that comes back to this idea of having a responsibility to the wider industry and to the people, the partners that we work with. From a cultural point of view, I have found the culture at TOAST to be extremely open. We discuss everything across all layers of the business with absolute honesty and do make the calls together.
Across our senior leadership team, we actually have a really broad range of experience across different types and sizes of brands and businesses. Everybody has their own area of specialism. So the way we handle any of these issues is about airing it openly, talking about challenges and understanding the impact for all the people involved, not just for the brand itself.
I do have a really high level of confidence that we have a very capable team. And we do leverage our trusted partners, whether that’s Segura, UKFT. We have a number of different third parties that we also work with, who’ve been really carefully chosen for their values alignment with TOAST as well as their expertise. We’re able to work that through sometimes with some external perspectives as well. You’re right, you won’t always find the answer you want, but just to ignore it and walk away is often the least responsible action you can take.
I would agree with that. We’re a technology publication, as we mentioned a couple of times, so we’re always keen to tie things back to how technology supports the kind of work you’re doing. You mentioned the work you’ve done with Circulo before.
Yeah.
Is there anything else about the digital side of your take-back programme or managing the systems for repair tracking? Because I think a lot of brands listening to this who don’t have repair initiatives, there’ll be two reasons for it. One is it’s not the right category, they’re not the right brand, it’s not the right consumer to have or scale that kind of thing. The other is just the pure practicalities of it. The other is quite literally: how do we manage something like that?
Yes, you can measure KPIs around customer loyalty and upselling and things like that. You can find value in it, but in order to find the value, you have to do some heavy lifting upfront. You have to be willing to say, “Okay, this is a complex programme. We need to keep track of it in a way that is not paper,” as you mentioned. Is there anything else about the digital systems there that you think is particularly interesting or is likely to resonate with our readership and our listeners?
Well, I think the Circulo project, if you like, has been fascinating actually. The whole take-back scheme, or our donate programme at TOAST: obviously the brand was much smaller when it first started offering some of those things and has grown and grown. As such, demand for some of those services or initiatives has become higher as well, and some of the ways of working just weren’t scalable.
Historically that was always a very manual process, a little bit as you’re describing there, which is fine if you’ve only got a few of them. But as that becomes a greater volume of pieces, it became a lot of paperwork in-store. And also this thing about how you’d go in and donate unwanted pieces, and then they just disappeared off into the ether from a customer point of view. That didn’t really feel consistent for us with the level of transparency we aspire to across the board.
In reality, those pieces go through a rigorous assessment and repair process to ensure that we can maximise their life cycle. Our customers are so engaged, we really felt that giving them visibility of what happens next once they’ve dropped things off was important. A lot of brands have offered to take back products, and I think customers have lost confidence. There’s been a lot of exposure of the reality of some of those programmes. So we really felt this was a very important point for us to invest in.
Now when you donate a piece, it’s entered digitally, customers receive acknowledgement, and they can also track where their piece has gone, whether it’s been repaired and into our Reworn programme or whether it’s been donated to a charity partner. And we’ve also been working to digitise repairs too, which is obviously one of the most utilised services that we offer. Again, they can track through the same platform. It’s a much richer experience for them.
But I also think for our store teams, feedback has been it’s just a much slicker operation, takes so much less of their time. That is a really lovely place where actually you’re enhancing the service level at TOAST, which is already very high, but we’re also just making it much more efficient as well.
Making it much more efficient and also giving people visibility into the fact that their own values-driven choices do make a difference. As you said, it’s not just “Come in, pat yourself on the back,” but rather, “Come in and get some level of visibility into how your action is manifesting.”
And our customers really love a dialogue with the brand. They are highly engaged in a way that I’ve never experienced anywhere else. So they do very much appreciate the recognition, as you say, for the act that they have taken, but also knowing what happens next and feeling very confident that they’ve done the right thing. I think that’s why we get donations to us as opposed to even dropping them off at a charity shop: they feel really confident that we are going to make sure that they are extending their life cycle in some way.
Maybe a little flip side to this idea of an engaged, values-driven consumer is something else I pulled from your Social Conscience Report: you did a reusable packaging pilot. It’s an interesting behavioural case study for me because it seems like it was a success where it was used, in the sense that, of the people who took it up, the majority of customers who paid the charge did go on to engage with it. They went on to return the packaging and so on.
But at the same time, I think you said only a small percentage, a single digit or even a single percentage, of eligible orders actually opted to use reusable packaging. This, to me, feels emblematic of that tension we’ve hinted at a couple of times, which is that when you slap a cost on the more sustainable option or the values-driven option, people don’t tend to pick it.
Normally we talk about that at the product level, where you have something that’s made of lower-impact materials or it’s manufactured in the UK, for instance. And you say, “Okay, you can have this, but it’s more expensive.” A good amount of people will go, “Okay, fine, but my level of spend here is more important than my values are.” But this is a really low-cost option and it’s demonstrably good for the environment, and still the majority of people turn it down. Why do you think that is? What do you think is behind that behaviour?
Well, I think you’ve hinted at it there anyway. It’s a low cost, but it is still an additional cost. Psychologically, for some customers, that is still a barrier, particularly online where you could walk away, come back to it, as opposed to in-store where it’s more instantaneous. There is definitely a communication challenge, and even our very engaged customers often are still keen to understand more of what the tangible benefit actually is.
I do think this is one of those areas where scale, it’s a little bit chicken and egg, right? Because if more people adopt it, that’ll improve the cost and make it more viable for businesses and customers. So I’m not sure I really have the perfect answer here. It’s something we are looking at how we integrate into a much bigger review of packaging, especially given that our online business is something like 60 to 70% of our sales. It’s so significant, and actually we would love to make even small improvements there because the cumulative impact is potentially huge.
I do think it’s how we serve that up to customers: making sure, in the way that we’ve just done with Circle and Circulo, that we’re helping them to understand, if you make this choice, what is the impact? How can we make you feel good about having made that small investment? I think that is probably at the crux of it.
I think that’s a good answer. Before we finish, I’ve got a two-pronged AI question. You might or might not be the person to answer it, but I’m going to ask it anyway. The first prong: like, I think, an increasing number of people, I spend more of my working day nowadays in Codex, ChatGPT Work, desktop-equivalent sort of thing. And I had an interesting experience when I was researching TOAST.
Your website was the first time the in-app ChatGPT browser had offered me AI assistant, agentic tools. Your website exposes a few of them. One is searching the catalogue, one’s looking at products, one’s working with a basket, moving to checkout and so on. That’s all derived from the WebMCP standard, I think. I just wanted to know if it’s something you built, something that came bundled with another piece of your e-commerce stack. I know it’s not your area, but if you’ve got any visibility into it, I’d love to know.
Yeah, sure. My understanding is that most, if not all, of the WebMCP tools are actually available to us because we’re on Shopify, and Shopify switched these tools on in August this year for their customers. So that, I think, is why we have access to them.
In terms of the benefit it’s offering us, it’s still a little bit soon for us to tell as they’ve been added so recently. And it’s quite tricky to monitor AI traffic, and all the traffic, really effectively because you rely on someone clicking through to your store directly. At the moment, we believe we’re getting relatively low traffic from LLMs, with the majority of traffic coming from ChatGPT, but that doesn’t necessarily give you all the answers.
We have a really incredible e-com team who are real mavens of newness. So they are operating a very clever test-and-learn programme at the moment. We’ve got a really ambitious roadmap for the next 12 to 18 months, looking at a lot of these things. We’ve been a Shopify partner for a while. We work very closely with their teams to learn how we’re going to take advantage of all of this in a way that feels right.
I think that’s a really good answer. We have similar visibility, or lack thereof, into the traffic that comes our way via LLMs. Of referrals, it’s about 7% these days of that referral traffic that comes to us from ChatGPT primarily, a tiny bit from Perplexity. But that doesn’t give you a lot of visibility into where you appeared in a query as a citation or a product recommendation, in your case, and that then didn’t translate into a website visit but would have historically done under the traditional Google model. So I agree, it’s an evolving space, and it sounds like you’ve got the right attitude to it.
The second prong of this final question is: for a brand in TOAST’s shoes, which, as you said, has a social conscience of which environmental impact is a part, what’s your take on the use of AI in general? Would you generate e-com images or campaign images with AI? Would you consider that to be a breach of the promise, either ethically or environmentally?
There’s a broad spread of opinions on where that fits in right now, and as somebody responsible for brand, it feels like that falls within your remit maybe more than the WebMCP question did.
Yeah. Agentic commerce is one thing, and I think that is now so integrated with so many of the standard tools that we use. I don’t think it’s very easy to extricate yourself as a brand or an individual. I think we’ve tread a cautious line at TOAST in terms of improved efficiency versus brand control, and also the point around environmental impact. That’s something a lot of our team members have raised questions around.
From a broader, more ethical point of view, our focus has been very much on ensuring we don’t displace creatives. We have a real commitment to creative communities. I think philosophically we are quite an analogue brand in many ways. We have commitment to creatives, but also one of our pillars is very much about sustaining traditional craft processes. That’s embedded in our products, but I also think is reflected in our asset creation. So we should be protective of those processes in that sense too.
So no, I don’t think we would want to generate PDP or campaign images through AI. That doesn’t feel right for us, certainly not right now. I can’t see it being an area that we would want to move into. I don’t really believe that’s aligned to our values, and if we start to compromise on those, then that’s the point at which we would start to lose the brand.
I think that’s a good way to judge technology investments, technology frameworks and stuff in general, to be honest: the things that are aligned with the brand, the things that resonate, and the things that help to deliver on the promise of the brand or the promise of the product.
Rosie, that’s all my questions. Thanks very much for letting me quiz you on a pretty broad spectrum of stuff there. It’s been a pleasure having you on.
Well, it’s been lovely to be here and really lovely to meet you, Ben.
Perfect.
And that’s the end of my conversation with Rosie. I hope you’ve enjoyed this break from the usual tech CEO talk. I certainly have. It’s easy to fall into a bit of a rut with these things and then to look back and find out that you’ve been looking at fashion from one quite fixed vantage point for way too long. And there’s nothing like talking to a brand to challenge or validate your patterns of thinking.
We are, I’m afraid, back to tech executive territory next week. In the meantime, though, enjoy the autumn. Fall, I guess I should say, for our American and international listeners. If you haven’t taken a hike in a while, you have my permission slash encouragement to go out and do so today, inspired by this episode. You might come back with some unexpected thoughts on technology for fashion because, as we’ve just heard, they cross over in places you might not always think about.
And you also have my permission to read both Walden and Pilgrim at Tinker Creek. They’re both really good. Maybe we’ll do a The Interline reading list at the end of the year, if that’s not too self-indulgent. Either way, thanks for listening.
Grace and I will be here on Tuesday with the next edition of The Edit. I’ve been enjoying that format a lot now that we’ve been doing it for a good few months, and I know a bunch of our audience is into it as well. Then next Thursday, I’m back on the one-to-one interview train as it barrels at breakneck speed towards the end of 2026. I think we’ve got another seven or so shows for this year after this one. Then we’re going to be taking a break from both interviews and The Edit over the holidays. After that, we’ll be back at the start of 2027 with season three.
You all seem to love what we’re doing with both weekly shows, based on the comments we get in person and remotely, so don’t expect us to make any big format shifts. But there are some other ideas I’d like to play around with with this show in the new year. I’ll let you know if and when they start to come to fruition. For now, though, thanks for listening, and I’ll talk to you again really soon.