As the Renew program reaches a major milestone, Lilah Horwitz contemplates what it took to get there—and how far we still have to go.

Two million garments. That’s the massive milestone the EILEEN FISHER Renew take-back program recently reached. Since its inception in 2009, the program has collected a total of two million garments. Of those, one million have been resold, donated or remade.

For Lilah Horwitz, Director of Renew Content & Marketing, who started with Renew back in 2014 when it was still called GREEN EILEEN, two million marks a moment to reflect on the hard work and innovation it took to get here. It’s also a reminder that, before the program can make an impact on the level it was intended to have, there’s a lot more work to be done. After all, two million is only scratching the surface—it amounts to just 5.4% of everything EILEEN FISHER has made in the last 39 years.

“We didn’t wave a wand and do this,” Horwitz says. “This is a really hard thing that the brand did.”

Now, she says, “I feel like things are speeding up.” Sorting is currently handled by a Colorado-based company called Tersus, which uses a waterless washing technology. For online sales, warehousing and fulfillment are handled by Trove Recommerce.

“We were able to grow and scale because these new innovative partners appeared on the market,” says Horwitz. As brands forge a path toward sustainability and circularity, more systems and support evolve too, making it a little easier for other brands to follow suit.

This is just one illustration of how innovation can slowly begin to reshape the industry. Another example lies in what Horwitz calls second-tier clothes: those slightly damaged pieces that still retain value for resale.

Horwitz wonders, “If we can find the right customer for slightly damaged pieces that are still super wearable, can we help people start offsetting purchases of new clothing?”

“We want to be responsible as a brand, that’s part of our thing. We don’t want to say to our customer ‘Only bring back the things we can resell.’” The whole point is circularity; it’s about keeping a garment in the cycle of use—whether that means mending, reselling, remaking or downcycling it. But the biggest win is making sure that wearable clothes live a longer life before having to transform at all. As Horwitz notes, “The most sustainable garment you can wear is one that’s already been made, and already been worn.”

“The most sustainable garment you can wear is one that’s already been made, and already been worn.”

—Lilah Horwitz, Director of Renew Content & Marketing

As more brands work toward mitigating the massive environmental impact of the fashion and apparel industry, one truth begins to emerge: There is no single, simple fix. Making clothing with the goal of creating a circular manufacturing model requires many small, successful efforts by stakeholders in every stage of the process, from agriculture and harvesting, to manufacturing, to retail and resale.

In other words, as we work toward circularity in the apparel industry, we aren’t seeking one big, overarching solution. The trick is to trust that many small initiatives, pursued separately or knit together, can add up to a huge positive impact.

We can make a difference, but the work is far from finished. As Horwitz says, “Two million garments feels like a big number, but it’s really a drop in the bucket.”

Indeed, the EILEEN FISHER Renew program has brought home the reality that two million, while a formidable number, is only a small percentage of what a single brand has made within the vast landscape of the apparel industry. What’s more, most of the clothing and textiles the industry produces are still landfilled, incinerated, illegally dumped in our precious natural environment or exported to lower-income countries.

“We are not circular by any means,” says Carmen Gama, EILEEN FISHER’s Director of Circularity. “No one in the world is circular, but one of the things that helps us on the path to becoming circular is that we start with high quality materials and most of them are natural fibers. And our garments are simple. That in itself allows a garment to have multiple lives. When they are no longer wearable as garments, the majority can go to fiber recycling, or textile-to-textile recycling.”

As a brand, EILEEN FISHER has committed to finding and furthering the kind of small initiatives that add up: recycling water bottles to make shoes, promoting regenerative agriculture and sustainable farming when sourcing fabrics and using low-waste wool felting processes to turn post-consumer clothes into artisanal fabrics. EILEEN FISHER is also pursuing options like fiber-to-fiber recycling for damaged inventory that can’t be felted.