Circular Business Models to address Reverse Logistics in fashion retail. An analysis of barriers and opportunities to scalability

Companies are increasingly pushed to take responsibility for the post-consumer stage of their product’s lifecycle for ecological and ethical reasons. In textiles, the recovery rates are low due to the complexity of reverse logistics. The scope of this developmental paper is to explore how partnering with circular business models operating in the resale economy can help retail companies in reverse logistics practices to recover value from end-of-life products. Case studies of players operating in the luxury industry will highlight the barriers for companies to fully embrace the circular economy and will provide evidence to address the issue of scalability thanks to cooperation with network stakeholders.