SuperLooper, Baby Clothing Rent & Recycle Service

We chatted to Jenny at SuperLooperLife.com about her quest to keep baby clothes out of landfill and in the loop using their rental service and how it’s good for both saving money and space, as well as reducing waste and helping to protect your baby’s future.

Jen writes:

Back in the olden days (the 1980s WAY before I came up with the SuperLooper Baby Clothing Rent & Recycle Service) I studied Fashion and Marketing at Newcastle Poly.  

I was a pretty bad student until I found my passion, aka ’streetwear’ and clothes in a post-punky style.  I knew a band called Hurrah! who loved wearing vintage American shirts.  

I collected a pile of these garments from Kensington High Street.  They were full of holes and tears but beautifully made from fantastic fabrics.  I chopped them up and remodelled them into a patchwork kind of look, and the band Hurrah wore them for a fashion pop video I made for my final degree.  I guess now we’d call this upcycling! (You see these shirts everywhere now – particularly in Urban Outfitters). 

After college I made shirts from furnishing fabrics and fabric scraps, I also had a handprinted collection.  I loved the idea of reusing stuff, and this passion was to reemerge many years later with SuperLooper.

In the nineties I worked in music TV, and then in 2009 I started a children and baby clothing brand called SuperNatural, using organic cotton and cotton alternative fabrics like natural bamboo, and modal made from beech trees.  

In 2018 I heard about the circular economy and a business in Denmark who were renting instead of selling their baby clothes.  This made sense because babies grow so quickly – mine sometimes grew out of their garments before I’d had the chance to use them!

 Then I heard that there are 183 million items of outgrown baby clothes stored away, unused in UK homes and I decided it was definitely time to stop making more clothes and instead to find a way to get what exists back into circulation.  

So, after many focus groups and beta tests, I set up SuperLooper Baby Clothing Rent & Recycle Service.  

Everyone loves the idea of SuperLooper. It makes sense and it gives both donors and renters a stake in trying to do their bit to reduce waste and care for the future of the planet for their kids.  

However, renting is still a relatively new concept for parents to get their heads around, even if they’re super OK with the idea of dressing their babies in secondhand clothes (which has become so much more accepted in the short time SuperLooper has been around).  

Happily, many parents hand down clothes between them.  There are also lots of secondhand outlets and platforms available now, so clothes can be bought inexpensively and reused.  But this still doesn’t get us past the fact that there are simply too many clothes out there in the first place, the 183 million redundant ones for instance and not forgetting all those fast fashion throwaways. So, rather than buy more and more which get stored away to be forgotten or chucked on the landfills, why not share what’s already out there in existence?  Like the ultimate hand-me-down!  And why own clothes that only get worn a few times when you can rent them, use them and send them back to be enjoyed by others?

In these difficult financial days renting shared secondhand clothes also makes really good sense for the pocket too.

We still have a big job on our hands to find the sort of people who get what we, as a not-for-profit, are trying to do and go the extra mile to sign up!  ANY help to achieve this goal is SO appreciated and I’m always open to suggestions of how to make it happen and always on the lookout for partners who might be up for working with me.  

So, if you know anyone in your community with spare time on their hands and who wants a meaningful volunteer project to work on – PLEASE send them my way.  And of course please pass the SuperLooper Baby Clothing Rent & Recycle Service name on to any friends or family having babies or wanting to clear out their cupboards of outgrown clothes.”

If you’d like to find out more, please click superlooperlife.com and share this article with your parent/grandparenty friends.

Follow incredibusy founder Ali Clifford on instagram, and why not check out the incredibusy salvaged speed loom too, it’s an ace gift idea for friends and family in holy-sock despair – enjoy some mindful repair!