Digital garment repair platform (CIRCLEWEAR)

Repair services available in many places today are not easily accessible to consumers due to lack of digitally integrated repair ecosystems. To make garment repair and maintenance widely accessible, CIRCLEWEAR project aims to develop a digital platform where tailors, repair service users and delivery service operators seamlessly meet. The functionality and further scalability of the digital platform crucially depends on its business potential for tailors and delivery service operators as well as its suitability to accommodate consumers’ preferences. Therefore, CIRCLEWEAR intends also to conduct experimental research tailored to elicit stated as well as actual preferences and willingness-to-pay of consumers for garment repair services.  In addition, CIRCLEWEAR builds and tests business cases with the digital platform to build confidence of actors on its economic feasibility when scaled up.   

The digital platform will be built to serve consumers in Sweden first and in Europe in the future. Consumer preference experiments will also be conducted in several countries. The project contributes towards real transformation of clothing consumption habits by making repair and maintenance an attractive and accessible choice for broad consumer groups in Sweden and abroad. CIRCLEWEAR is a collaboration of RISE researchers in consumer behaviour and business ecosystem, software developers and designers from Boid AB, and a repair service start-up, Circle Wear AB.