Thanks to rigorous collection work, the new SAPE.E second-hand clothing sales platform offers nuggets at affordable prices.
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Where to dress cheap with quality clothes? It is this difficult equation that Mehdi Zerroug intends to solve by launching an online sales platform of second-hand products, called Sapé.e.
While the margins of the thrift stores of big cities explode and the fast-fashion prosperous thanks to the polyester, Sapé.e offers a quality with any test of affordable clothes. On the site, you can also find a Gucci jacket at 60 euros or a burberry coat at 100 euros as a very hot knit at 20 euros…
For this, the site is based on a well -established internal expertise in terms of collection and sorting of clothing. In 1957, the grandfather of Mehdi Zerroug created the company Framimex, specializing in the import-export of textiles. After the war, it is important from the United States of jeans, checkered shirts … recovered from American households, which he sells in France at derisory prices.
In the 1990s, the Ecotextile branch was created to develop a clothing collection system in France using special containers implemented in partnership with local authorities. Each day, now, 40 tonnes of textiles arrive in Picardy, where the company is installed, “the equivalent of four semi-trailers”, specifies Mehdi Zerroug. It is this volume that allows SAPÉ.E to offer reasonable prices – even if this implies renouncing high margins, in an ethical concern.
scratched or not
At a time when we alert on the ravages of textile waste and overconsumption, the French seem more inclined to deposit their old clothes in these terminals … but not only! In this “clothing deposit”, as the specialist calls him, he surprisingly discovers a large number of articles never worn or very little, transposable almost as they are in store. It is in particular these “nuggets” – models scratched or not, vintage or more recent, always of quality – which are put on sale by Sapé.e.
Among all the textiles collected by the company, around 40 % are intended to be sold – on the site, therefore, but also for other thrift stores, as a wholesaler would. The remaining 60 % is valued (in insulation materials for the building, for example) and recycled to supply the effilochage companies that transform clothes into fiber and in wire to remove or retricate them.
And development possibilities are important: out of a potential of 600,000 tonnes of used used clothing (from 2.5 billion to 3 billion parts), only 250,000 are collected in France each year. The rest ends up in loose in household waste or cremated. “Hence the need to encourage the deposit of clothes in the appropriate containers,” said Mehdi Zerroug.