circular-fashion
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Joon Silverstein
Joon Silverstein is the Chief Marketing Officer of Coach, the New York leather goods house inside Tapestry Inc., and the founder of Coachtopia, the circular sub-brand she launched in 2023 to build luxury products out of what the industry usually throws away. She trained first as a cultural anthropologist - a BA from Columbia, fieldwork as a Fulbright Fellow - then added an MBA from Harvard Business School and a stint at The Boston Consulting Group before leading change at Louis Vuitton and Victoria's Secret. She joined Coach in 2014 as SVP of Global Customer Experience and worked her way through digital, ecommerce, creative, sustainability and North America marketing before being elevated to CMO in January 2025. Her signature move is treating consumers as collaborators rather than targets: Coach's spring 2026 'Explore Your Story' campaign was co-created with Gen Z communities from the US to China, and the brand posted 25% revenue growth in fiscal Q2 2026 on the back of its strongest new-customer acquisition on record. She gave a TED Talk at TEDNext 2024 arguing that waste is a human invention, not a law of nature.
Buffalo Exchange
Buffalo Exchange is a family-owned resale fashion chain founded in Tucson, Arizona in 1974 that pioneered the buy-sell-trade model for secondhand clothing. Customers bring in gently used, on-trend clothing and accessories and receive cash or store trade on the spot, while shoppers browse a hand-picked mix of current styles, vintage finds and designer pieces at a fraction of retail. With roughly 40 stores across the United States and about 590 employees, Buffalo Exchange has built a business around affordable, sustainable style, keeping millions of garments in circulation each year and channeling small change into local charities through programs like Tokens for Bags.
Rebag
Rebag is a New York-based online and retail marketplace for buying and selling pre-owned luxury handbags, watches, jewelry and accessories. Founded in 2014 by Charles Gorra, the company built proprietary technology - most notably Clair, an appraisal index, and Clair AI image recognition - to standardize resale pricing and pay sellers upfront. It aims to bring transparency and liquidity to what it calls an opaque secondary luxury market.
Kintra Fibers
Kintra Fibers is a Brooklyn-based materials science company developing a bio-based, biodegradable alternative to conventional polyester. Built on polybutylene succinate (PBS) derived from plant sugars rather than fossil fuels, Kintra's yarn performs like standard polyester and runs on existing melt-spinning equipment, but composts in controlled conditions and sheds far less persistent microplastic. Founded in 2018 by Billy McCall and Alissa Baier-Lentz, the H&M Group-backed company has raised roughly $10M total and is piloting its fiber with brands including Inditex, BESTSELLER, Reformation and PANGAIA.
Simplifyber
Simplifyber is a North Carolina biomaterials company reinventing how soft goods are made. Its proprietary natural-fiber liquid, Fybron, is injected into 3D molds to form fabric directly, skipping the spinning, weaving, cutting, and sewing steps of conventional textile production. Founded in 2021 by fashion veteran Maria Intscher-Owrang and Phil Cohen, the company targets fashion, footwear, bags, automotive and aviation interiors, and consumer packaging with a cellulose-based, largely biodegradable alternative to fossil-derived materials. It closed a $12M Series A led by Suzano Ventures in April 2025.
unspun
unspun is a San Francisco-based fashion-technology company that built Vega, the world's first 3D weaving system for apparel. Vega weaves garments directly from yarn in minutes, skipping cut-and-sew steps to enable on-demand, near-zero-waste, locally produced clothing. A certified B Corp founded in 2015, unspun sells custom-fit jeans direct to consumers while licensing its hardware and software to brands and retailers aiming to decarbonize their supply chains. Its stated mission is to reduce global human carbon emissions by 1%.
Curtsy
Curtsy is a mobile-first, peer-to-peer resale marketplace where Gen Z and young millennial women buy and sell secondhand clothing, shoes and accessories. Founded in 2016 and originally a dress-rental service, it pivoted to resale and built its edge around making listing fast for casual sellers - using machine learning to suggest prices, fill in item details and estimate shipping weight, backed by human review. Sellers keep more of their money than on rival platforms (a ~19-20% commission), buyers save up to 70% on brands like Lululemon, Free People and SKIMS, and the app carries a 4.8-star rating across tens of thousands of reviews. Curtsy raised an $11M Series A led by Index Ventures in January 2021, part of $14.5M total funding.
Everywhere Apparel
Everywhere Apparel is a Los Angeles-based materials science company that turns textile waste into 100% recycled cotton clothing through its proprietary, GRS-certified CirCot fiber system. Founded in 2019 by three Stanford graduates, it sells blank and custom apparel to brands, bands, screen printers and uniform programs, and closes the loop with a free QR-code take-back program that recycles worn garments back into new products.
Indyx
Indyx is a San Francisco digital wardrobe app that lets people catalog everything they own, plan outfits, work with personal stylists, and eventually resell their clothes - all in one place. Founded by two former retail-industry insiders, it makes the opposite bet of most fashion businesses: instead of selling you the next thing, it helps you actually use what you already own. Users get a searchable digital closet with automatic background removal, cost-per-wear tracking, packing lists, and social sharing, framed around a simple idea - know what you own, love what you wear.
Yidi Campbell
Yidi Campbell is the founder and CEO of Indyx, a San Francisco connected-wardrobe platform that lets people catalog, style, and resell the clothes they already own. A Georgetown business graduate, she moved from investment banking at Credit Suisse to corporate development at Gap Inc. and strategy at Athleta before launching Indyx in 2021 to fight fashion overconsumption from the closet outward.
Another Tomorrow
Another Tomorrow is a New York-based luxury fashion company building timeless womenswear with a sustainability-first model. Founded by former Morgan Stanley managing director Vanessa Barboni Hallik, it pairs farm-level material traceability with a digital ID on every garment, enabling provenance tracking, anti-counterfeiting, and authenticated resale. It was the first luxury fashion brand to earn B Corp certification and frames its work around human, animal, and environmental welfare.
Revive | B-Corp Certified
Revive (stylized (Re)vive) is a New York fashion-tech company that turns returned, damaged, and excess apparel into recovered revenue for brands. Its AI-powered platform inspects each item in minutes to flag damage type and resale potential, then cleans, lightly repairs, and routes goods back to stores or onto resale channels - so unsellable inventory becomes profit instead of landfill. A Certified B Corp, Revive has recovered roughly $23M in gross merchandise value and kept over 150,000 garments out of landfills.
Hyesung Kim
Hyesung Kim is the founder and CEO of Mineis, the Seoul company behind Charan, a full-service fashion recommerce platform that collects, inspects, cleans, photographs, prices, sells, and ships used clothing on the seller's behalf. A University of Chicago economics grad who started his first ad-tech company as an undergrad and later worked as a venture investor, Kim built Charan to remove the friction that keeps closets full of unworn clothes. The platform passed 400,000 users within a year of its 2023 launch, was named to Forbes Asia's 100 to Watch in 2024, and raised a 16.8 billion won Series B in 2025, bringing total funding to 32.2 billion won.
Vanessa Barboni Hallik
Vanessa Barboni Hallik spent fifteen years trading foreign exchange and emerging markets at Morgan Stanley, rose to Managing Director, then walked away to build Another Tomorrow, a B Corp certified luxury label that treats clothing as an asset. Every garment carries a digital ID tracing it from farm to closet and back into an authenticated resale program. She launched the brand six weeks before COVID-19 shut down the world and kept building.
Natasha Franck
Natasha Franck is the founder and CEO of EON, a New York company giving every garment a unique Digital ID so it can be traced, resold, repaired and authenticated across its entire life. She left a career in urban planning and smart cities to build the CircularID Protocol, an open standard now powering Digital Product Passports for brands like Coach's Coachtopia, Chloe and Mulberry, and feeding into EU regulation that will make these passports mandatory.
Cuyana
Cuyana is a San Francisco-based direct-to-consumer fashion company built on a two-word philosophy - Fewer, Better Things. Founded in 2011 by Karla Gallardo and Shilpa Shah, the brand makes premium leather goods, apparel, and travel essentials with sustainably-certified materials and an unusually long product lifespan. It runs a resale program (Revive), seven-plus retail stores, and ships globally.
Wendy Yu
Wendy Yu is the CEO of Cuyana, the San Francisco-based sustainable fashion brand built on the philosophy of 'fewer, better things.' A data-and-analytics-trained operator with a BS from MIT and an MBA from the University of Michigan, she worked her way through gaming, consulting, and digital marketing before joining Cuyana as Chief Digital Officer in 2018. When founder Karla Gallardo stepped down in 2025 after 14 years, Yu stepped into the CEO role - bringing her decade-plus of growth marketing and digital operations experience to the helm of a brand that has generated nearly half a billion dollars in lifetime DTC sales.
Anya Cheng
Anya Cheng is the Founder & CEO of Taelor, an AI-powered men's clothing rental and styling subscription service that raised $5M+ and ranked #1 in U.S. menswear rentals by GQ. A Taiwanese-American first-generation immigrant who spent 15+ years at Target, McDonald's, eBay, and Meta (where she helped launch Facebook Shopping), she pivoted to entrepreneurship to solve a problem she saw everywhere: busy professional men who needed to look sharp but hated shopping. Taelor combines AI trend forecasting with human stylists to deliver curated wardrobes to subscribers, tackling fashion's 30% waste problem along the way. Cheng also teaches at Northwestern's Medill School and mentors at 500 Startups.