Carolyn Butler of Borobabi
By Tamar Vidra
Like many new parents, Carolyn Butler was surprised by her daughter’s rapid growth. At first, it’s exponential quality was felt in the sheer amount of clothing her daughter went through. It takes around 8–10 weeks of newborns to grow out of their first clothes, leaving Carolyn with few places to put many pieces of lightly-warn clothing other than the donation box or a trash can. Now, as founder of Borobabi, she is at the helm of building a circular economy for children’s clothing in the United States.
Off the bat, Carolyn expressed that her vision for Borobabi is reflective of a larger shift in markets. Convinced that “the shift from linear economies to circular economies is the future,” Carolyn envisions that soon enough, “consumers won’t be responsible for post-consumer waste.” Companies will have to take ownership over the amount of trash they produce. Carolyn paints a picture for me: “One day, Coca Cola will have to pony up and take responsibility for every plastic bottle they put into the environment.” Children’s clothing, which is massively underutilized, was the right space to start constructing her very own circular economy.
Focusing on ages zero to six (periods of hypergrowth), Carolyn and her team constructed a business model based on taking clothes back: “whether you buy it for us or whether you rent it from us, we would hope one day that you send it back to us so that we can responsibly recycle it.” Do not be fooled: Borobabi’s approach to circularity does not just start at the end of a clothing’s lifetime, but at the start. Hitting all of the pillars of the circular economy, Borobabi intentionally partners with ethical and sustainable wholesalers who use materials that can be recycled. Once marketed on the platform, users have the option to buy or rent clothes new or used. They can then sell or return the clothing once they are done with its use (or buy it out of a rental, if they love it that much). When the item reaches the end of its life, Borobabi partners with local recyclers to recycle its materials back to fiber, and is currently the only company in the United States actively testing composting of post-consumer waste, which is the clear next step for the company’s technological edge.
The competitive landscape for sustainably-minded clothing companies is unique both in the United States and abroad. Carolyn describes an unusual experience of operating her business within the States: “usually in America, we’re at the forefront of everything and we’re the ones trying and failing and trying and failing, and then other people can just copy us. But when it comes to sustainability, we’re so far behind that we’re actually just copying what other people are doing.” While Borobabi has many differentiated features, Carolyn studies companies in the Netherlands, UK, and Canada as models and case studies. Surprisingly, the cohort she involves herself with abroad is an extremely collaborative crew: “they want to help and elevate each other because the bigger the space gets, the better we all are and the better it becomes for people and planet.”
While many may guess that 2020 was a hard year for the Borobabi team, Carolyn argues that children’s clothing tends to be recession-proof: “children grow no matter what, and you’re going to have to buy them clothes.” Moreover, Covid has sent positive tailwinds for sustainably-focused companies, as consumers have become more conscious about their spending and consumption habits. One of the only drawbacks of the pandemic has been restrictions on social gatherings, which inhibit word-of-mouth growth for Borobabi. Similar to Rent the Runway’s “dance floor effect,” Carolyn claims that Borobabi benefits from the “playground effect” where parents remarks on other children’s clothing turns into potent recommendations for her brand.
An engineer by training, Carolyn pursues learning from customers in an almost scientific way, surveying them, crafting hypotheses, trying out different techniques and tweaks to try and boost sales and refine product, and analyzing statistics from the results. One of the biggest friction points that Carolyn found in her conversations with customers was browsing online. Realizing that customers were looking for curation, she tested sending customized packages straight to homes and witnessed remarkable success. Her conversion rate for customers was 85% and Borobabi now offers the option to have clothing curated and packaged together in bundles.
This rigorous testing of new ideas and assumptions makes me particularly bullish on the Borobabi team and willing to bet that they are the right group to innovate the children’s clothing industry and construct a sustainable and formidable circular economy.
Originally published at https://wave-columbia.medium.com on December 4, 2021.
