What Lloop's childrenswear resale platform actually does for your business, not just your customer's conscience
I promised Rachel Sheila Kan, who runs the Real Circularity Summit, that I would write up what I actually learned there. So in this blog I would like to share more about Lloop, the childrenswear (and now also ladieswear) resale platform, and what it actually does for a brand's own numbers, not just a customer's conscience.
Charlotte Morley's business, once thelittleloop, is now Lloop. I featured her in issue 6 of this newsletter, and she was kind enough to say some very generous things about that piece in public. Since then the business has kept evolving, and its latest step has been bringing womenswear into the preloved proposition alongside children's resale, with thelittleloop continuing as the children's specific side of things. What follows is not the consumer pitch, it is what I think you actually need to know if you are the one deciding whether to plug this into your own business.
Start with the part I checked myself before believing it. On Kite Clothing's product pages sits a small badge(in the bottom right of my screen shot above): buy now, sell back later, with a guaranteed buy-back figure shown against the item before anyone has bought it. It is not a gimmick. Lloop's own data puts a number on the effect: a 9% conversion uplift from these widgets on the product page and at cart. A customer buying with a known, honest exit value attached hesitates less. That is the first thing this does for you, and it happens before a single item is ever resold.
What happens after the sale is where the real case sits. Every customer gets a digital closet, automatically populated with their purchases, and when they are ready to sell, there is no listing, no photography, no admin on their side, Lloop handles the whole thing and pays them instant credit to spend with you again. Lloop's own figures on what that credit actually does: customers spend twice the value of their voucher when they redeem it, and resale credit customers spend 1.35 times more on new items than customers who have never engaged with resale at all. Forty five per cent of the customers earning that credit are new to the brand or had lapsed. This is a loyalty and acquisition mechanic that happens to be dressed up as a sustainability feature, not the other way round, and roughly 10% of a partner brand's own customers end up routinely reselling once it is live.
There is a genuine cost argument too, and a genuinely underused one. Lloop will also take a brand's excess inventory or unsold returns directly, process and resell them, and split the proceeds, a route that has nothing to do with customer takeback. For a brand carrying end of season stock or a pile of returns with nowhere useful to go, that is value recovered rather than a warehouse problem, on top of whatever revenue share comes from the customer side, which Lloop guarantees on every item resold, with no platform, setup or per-item fees to you.
Worth flagging for anyone thinking about compliance rather than just marketing: Lloop tracks every item back to its original sale, which means it is quietly building EPR-ready data as it goes, positioned to help a brand pay the lowest eco-modulated fee once Extended Producer Responsibility reporting becomes mandatory here. And Charlotte's own pitch against the obvious alternative is sharp: rather than competing with Vinted for the customers who will happily list an item themselves, this is built for the 66% who will not, a group she claims shows up to 200% higher engagement with a branded resale offer than they ever would peer to peer. Real partners already live on this include Kite, JoJo Maman Bebe, Little Green Radicals, Roarsome, Grass and Air, Ducky Zebra, Charley's Wild World and Smalls Merino, so this is not an unproven idea being tested on you first.
In our discussion, Charlotte was clear that whatever cannot be resold gets disposed of responsibly rather than left to drift toward landfill, closing the loop properly rather than leaving a gap at the end of it. And where I think this goes next is the Digital Product Passport: as those become standard, a garment's resale and provenance history is exactly the kind of information that belongs on one. That is my own thinking, not something Charlotte said to me directly, but it follows naturally from what she has already built. So here is what this means for you: a product page badge that lifts conversion before you have sold anything twice over, a loyalty engine that brings back lapsed customers and lifts spend on the customers you already have, a genuine route for stock you would otherwise write down, and a head start on a compliance requirement that is coming whether you are ready for it or not. That is a considerably stronger case than 'it is good for the planet', even though it is that too.
FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTIONS
What does Lloop actually do for a brand, beyond the sustainability angle?
Its own data shows a 9% conversion uplift from the product-page and cart widgets, a 2x cash uplift on redeemed vouchers, 1.35x higher spend on new items from resale-credit customers, and 45% of that credit going to customers who are new to the brand or had lapsed. It also takes excess inventory and unsold returns directly and splits the resale proceeds, separate from customer takeback.
Does it cost anything to set up?
No platform, setup or per-item fees, and the brand receives a guaranteed revenue share on every item resold on top of the conversion and loyalty gains.
How is this different from a customer just selling on Vinted or eBay?
Lloop is positioned specifically at the roughly two-thirds of customers who will not list an item themselves on a peer-to-peer marketplace, claiming up to 200% higher engagement from that group via a branded resale offer than they would ever show peer to peer, which keeps the value inside the brand relationship rather than losing it to a third-party platform entirely.
Is there a compliance angle, not just a marketing one?
Yes. Lloop tracks items back to their original sale, building EPR-ready data as it goes, which it positions as helping a brand pay the lowest eco-modulated fee once Extended Producer Responsibility reporting on textiles becomes mandatory.
If you want help working out how a resale or circularity offer could fit your own brand, without adding to your workload, that is exactly the kind of conversation we have at The Nest. Come and talk to us.
The Nest News lands every Tuesday: three insights shaping maternity, baby and children's products, and the actions you can take. Sign up at https://www.thenest.uk.com/the-nest-news-signup
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