impossible Wardrobe
Helping people be more conscious about clothing and the environment.
Wardrobe is a tagging system for your clothes that worked with an app in order to manage what you had in your wardrobe.
Making our clothes work harder for us
The average UK household owns around £4,000 worth of clothes, but around a third of our clothing hasn’t been worn for at least a year. In the UK alone, this adds up to a staggering £30 billion of clothing sitting unused in our wardrobes.
Some of these clothes are too small or too big, are unflattering or difficult to clean, but often we’ve just forgotten about them for no reason. And when we forget about clothes - lamenting that we’ve ‘got nothing to wear’ - we typically go out and buy more.
This isn’t just frustrating for us. It’s really bad for the planet.
The global fashion industry accounts for 10% of global carbon emissions - that’s more than the aviation and shipping industries combined. Extending the life of our clothes for just three months would lead to a 5 to 10% reduction in our carbon, water and waste footprints.
One solution might be as simple as just keeping track of all the clothes that we own - so we buy less, and use what we have more.
So at Impossible, we designed a new app, ‘Wardrobe’ to do just this.
A app to tackle fashion waste
When we are developing new planet-centric concepts for products and services, we like to start with what we call planetary problems. This means considering what our planet and communities need first, beyond the individual user alone.
In this case, our planetary problem was the massive environmental impact of fashion production and waste.
Then, using planet-centric tools, we translated this much larger issue into a user problem that we could solve, designing a simple tool to be integrated into people’s everyday behaviours: everyday routine of choosing what to wear.
Part of the reason we buy and waste so much clothing, we reasoned, is because people forget what they already own.
Creating a digital wardrobe which keeps track of what we’re buying and what we already own will discourage excess consumption and waste, both making our lives easier and contributing to a healthier, more sustainable world.
Big problems, simple solutions
Planet Centric Design is based on the principle that when we create something new, it should make the world a better place.
Guided by the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), at Impossible we think carefully about designing products that contribute to achieving these goals - whether reducing inequality, tackling climate change or championing women and girls.
An app to keep track of what you own, extend the life cycle of clothes and reduce fashion waste directly contributes to SDGs 9, 12 and 13 - targeting responsible industry, consumption and climate action respectively.
Wardrobe is yet to be scaled, but provides a model of how planet-centric tools allow us to reframe big sustainability targets into everyday simple solutions and actionable product ideas.
The problems are big, but sometimes the solutions can be simple. And when it comes to tackling fashion waste, less is definitely more.
Growing businesses for the better
Bond Touch
Building 100 million healthy relationships by 2025.
Roche Navify™
Tumor Board
Save valuable time in tumor board coordination and patient case preparation.
Banco Atlantico
Delivering access to financial services in Angola.