Fashion brand Ruby hits on gem of an idea with its Ruby says Recycle pre-loved store

Sunday, 15 June 2025

Emily Miller-Sharma photographed at Ruby Says Recycle in Newmarket, Auckland.

Ruby has become the first New Zealand fashion clothing company to have a retail store solely dedicated to reselling used garments sold back to it by customers.

The Ruby Says Recycle store in Auckland’s Newmarket shopping precinct is part of the company’s desire to see greater sustainability in the vast clothing industry.

It’s an industry that’s been coming under increasing fire for its lack of sustainability credentials, including for the thousands of tonnes of used clothing that are ending up in landfills.

Emily Miller-Sharma, general manager and designer at Ruby, says the Newmarket Ruby Says Recycle store is stocked with clothing bought back from Rubettes (the collective name Ruby gives its customers) in its stores in Wellington, Auckland, Mount Manganui, Hamilton and Christchurch.

RSR, as Miller-Sharma calls Ruby Says Recycle, is not a marketing gimmick, she says.

It has to pay its way, and is part of Ruby’s aim to generate a growing proportion of its revenue from the parts of its operation that do not involve selling new clothes.

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It also sends a message to buyers, says Miller-Sharma, that Ruby clothes are durable and hold a resale value,.

Many fast fashion clothing items have lifespans that can be measured in months, or just a few years, companies that are sometimes, perhaps unfairly dubbed “slow fashion” make clothes to last many years, and are designed in many cases to be repairable.

In an age where so many clothes are sold with really short expected lives, the oldest item sold by Rubettes back to RSR was made and first sold in 2011, says Miller-Sharma.

It has taken quite an investment to get RSR up and running so people can get quotes for their no longer needed clothing at Ruby stores.

“Setting it up operationally has been really big,” Miller-Sharma says. “It’s like setting up an entirely new business.”

The issue of the durability of clothing came up in submissions on the Consumer Guarantees (Right to Repair) Bill, which is being debated by MPs.

One member of the public complained of the “psychological obsolescence” the fashion industry seeks to generate to constantly convince people to buy their latest styles.

Ruby’s take on psychological obsolescence is different, according to Miller-Sharma. It’s about the life stages of the wearer, rather than a short lifespan for the item.

“I used to be 25 years old, and now I'm 41, and I've got a five-year-old. The clothes that I wore then is, they're not the same, and that's okay,” she said.

Bodies and personal needs change over the years, she says, but clothing that is made to last can be passed onto a new home.

Emily Miller-Sharma says Ruby aims to increase the proportion of its revenue that does not come from the sale of new clothes.

“What is no longer good for me does not necessarily mean it’s not good for somebody else,” Miller-Sharma says.

Miller-Sharma says people used to think about clothing differently, back in an age when many households still had someone in them that could repair clothes, and when clothes were often far more robust and were intended to last for many years.

“Most houses had a sewing machine, and so it just was like, of course, you would repair something,” she says.

Somewhere in the region of 52,000 tonnes of textiles end up in landfills in New Zealand every year.

Those households still exist, and skills are still being passed down.

A testament to that is that Ruby started selling patterns online during the Covid lockdowns, and there were buyers.

Jacinta FitzGerald, chief executive of the Mindful Fashion association, which Ruby is a member of, says some New Zealand clothing makers have built sustainability into their business models.

Like Ruby, Wellington’s Kowtow for example, runs a resale arm it calls Relove.

The Australian Fashion Council launched the “Seamless” product stewardship scheme taking a leap on New Zealand on the pathway to reducing the environmental impact of end-of-life clothing.

But each year 52,000 tonnes of textiles end up in landfills, FitzGerald says.

Australia, where 200,000 tonnes ends up in landfills each year, has had enough. In 2021, clothing textiles were placed on the Federal Government’s “priority” list, requiring the industry to take action to reduce the quantity of textiles going to landfill.

In response, the Australian Fashion Council launched the “Seamless” product stewardship scheme focusing on recycling and reuse, funded by a small levy on each item of clothing imported, or produced in Australia.

Mindful Fashion has asked Minister for the Environment Penny Simmonds for a meeting with a view to bringing Seamless to New Zealand, but has so far not been given an audience.

For decades, New Zealand’s model was to import massive amounts of products from overseas without any thought for how they would be disposed of when they reached the end of their useful lives. That included millions upon millions of tyres.

There are gaps in the Australian scheme and also in the New Zealand waste numbers.

Global ecommerce operations like Temu and Shein are not a part of Seamless, and the clothing they send direct to consumers is not being counted.

With some imported products that cause massive waste headaches, New Zealand has introduced product stewardship schemes to help pay for cleaning up the waste they create.

The Tyrewise scheme, for example, has ended New Zealand’s long-standing failure to plan for the end of life of the 6.5 million tyres imported each year.

Since March last year, the country’s first regulated product stewardship scheme has collected just over 3m end-of-life tyres funded by levies on imported tyres.

Op shops are sorting huge amounts of used clothing performing a service that arguably amounts to a subsidy for the fast fashion industry.

Some are recycled into things like playground matting, however a large proportion are burnt as fuel to make concrete, which has helped Fletcher Building’s Golden Bay Concrete move away from coal and reduce its carbon emissions.

Stewardship schemes can boost local economies as well as reducing waste, by encouraging investment and jobs in collection, sorting and recycling.

“We’re clearly behind Australia in terms of our investment into infrastructure,” says Miller-Sharma.

She sees implicit subsidies from society, and even charities, to the fast fashion industry in dealing the end-of-life clothing they made a buck on.

“It goes to essentially volunteer workers who are working at, the charity op shops who basically are working for free for fast fashion to sort out their rubbish, which blows my mind,” she says.

One report in 2023 by economic consultancy Sapere said that nearly 11,000 tonnes of fashion clothing were donated to op-shops in Auckland each year. Of that, 9000 tonnes are redirected to landfill.

Stewardship schemes also send financial signals to companies and importers.

Seamless charges a lower levy to businesses like Ruby, which makes a quarter of its clothes in New Zealand. These are companies that invested in sustainability, making things to last, and making things designed to be repairable.

Outdoor clothing maker Patagonia urged MPs to establish guidelines that encourage durability, repairability, and responsible production when it made its submission on right to repair.

Like Ruby, Patagonia’s clothes are not priced like fast fashion.

Buying a piece of clothing from them costs more, but that allows the company to invest in building a repair network here.