Why we repair instead of replace

A free repair costs us more than a replacement would. We do it anyway, and the arithmetic is not as strange as it looks.

The numbers

Replacing a jacket costs us the wholesale price. Repairing one costs twenty minutes of a tailor’s time, which is more. On a single transaction, replacement wins every time.

Across ten years it does not. A customer whose jacket was mended in 2019 has bought from us four times since. A customer who was sent a new one bought once more and then stopped, because the message they received was that the first jacket was disposable.

What we will fix

Seams, buttons, zips, hems, cuffs, small moth holes and worn pocket bags. For two years from purchase that is free, including the postage both ways. After two years we still do it, at the cost of the tailor’s time.

What happens at the end

When a garment is genuinely finished, send it back. Wool goes to a mill in Prato that shreds and respins it; cotton goes to a wiping-cloth manufacturer two towns from our workshop. Nothing we have made has gone to landfill through us.