Let’s Help the Circular Transition of Fashion

“EVERY SCRAP IS A RESOURCE“

Atelier Riforma is an innovative startup with a social vocation and the mission of facilitating the sustainable management of post-consumer textile waste and promoting the transition towards a more circular fashion production and consumption model.

Once upon a time

Born as a project in 2019 and then becoming a company (s.r.l.) in 2020, Atelier Riforma started from an idea that was then out of the chorus: to create a network of tailors, designers and social tailors who would transform discarded garments to give them more value and put them back into circulation on a sales platform. This is how, when we were still not talking about circular fashion, we launched the first Italian marketplace dedicated to upcycling in 2020.

We collected unused garments from individuals and organisations, carefully catalogued them, and then distributed them to our network of ‘upcyclers’. Day after day, the network has grown to more than 25 sartorial realities, spread all over Italy. These include several social tailor shops, which promote the labour inclusion of disadvantaged people such as migrants, ex-convicts and women victims of violence.

Never heard of upcycling? Find out in this podcast recorded for the documentary ‘Ethical Braids’.

This experience allowed us to understand how difficult it is to manage used clothing in a sustainable way, and especially direct it to the best repurposing method.

Each garment has in fact unique characteristics that influence the chances of it being reused, recycled or re-tailored.

We wanted to transform this challenge into an opportunity and so the idea of Re4Circular was born in 2021.

Re4Circular

Re4Circular is an innovative technology (for which we’re filing a patent!) that aims to help stakeholders in the second-hand fashion field to redirect each item of clothing towards the best ways to reuse them.

It is a digital platform that connects the realities dealing with the collection or sorting of used garments with the realities of circular fashion that need them in their resale, recycling or upcycling activities.

Supporting such platform is an Artificial Intelligence technology for the automatic cataloguing and digitalization of post-consume textile waste, which extracts the useful data for the repurposing process from the picture of each garment.

Re4Circular is not a technology that Atelier Riforma uses internally, but a technological tool that we provide to any organisation that needs it, anywhere.
It is thanks to this lean and scalable business model that we are now able to apply our circular approach on a much larger scale.

Our dream? Making sure no garment transforms in waste after being used, but on the contrary keeps being re-used, transformed and recirculated, creating economic value and new employment.

To learn more and stay updated, visit our Re4Circular landing page!

Co-Founder

Sara Secondo, co-founder e COO

Born in 1991, Sara has an interdisciplinary, legal background, has always been active in association work and is certified as a social impact assessor.

Elena Ferrero, co-founder e CEO

Born in 1993, Elena has an interdisciplinary background in science, is passionate about popularisation and has gained experience in the start-up and open innovation field in recent years.

Our Team

For the Artificial Intelligence part we collaborate with three young engineers, for the platform development we collaborate with the company Huulke, and every year great interns join our team!

Finally, supporting us is a long list of mentors and advisors as well as a large ecosystem dedicated to social innovation.

Check out all our partners on the Home page!

Over the years we have received several awards and constant attention from the press. Below you can find the most recent articles about us and the biggest awards we have won.