2021 Look Back
It’s been another challenging pandemic year for all of us but as 2021 comes to a close, we wanted to take a moment to reflect on all that we have achieved together, as a team and a community. We are also looking ahead to 2022 and setting goals which we will strive to achieve with the help of our incredible Retykle community. Thank you for propelling circularity with us!
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ENHANCEMENTS
At the beginning of the year, we launched with a new look and enhanced experience: a brand new website. We poured over your survey responses to better understand where to spend time and resources to improve your experience with us. The tweaks we have made throughout the year have been with the goal of making everything about buying and selling with us, as effortless and rewarding as possible.
Our large scale tech project this year has been to introduce a new warehouse software which is a behind the scenes improvement to ensure that stock is warehoused with optimal efficiency and also that your orders can be picked and packed faster than ever. This new system is going to launch imminently and you’ll notice even faster order deliveries.
In the meantime, we also launched the option to choose express shipping at checkout for a same day delivery option for $60 so that if you’re in a rush, you can get a guaranteed speedy delivery.
We also introduced the option to allocate your own payments through your seller dashboard meaning that at any time, you can add your earnings to your account in points or transfer cash payouts, making it easier than ever to manage your payouts in the timeframe you want.
We want to continue rewarding you for your loyalty and commitment to going circular with us and we’re working on continually improving our Tyke Point Program. We introduced tiers, have personalised your emails to show you how many points you have and have introduced a slider at checkout so that you can apply any number of points instantly to your purchase instead of having to redeem coupons.
We also introduced a Carbon Savings Collection by creating a sustainability framework to demonstrate the carbon savings of shopping secondhand by item of clothing. We want to make the positive action of shopping secondhand tangible and we will be working towards making this feature available across all purchases as well as on your dashboard so that you can quantify your actions and teach your kids about this important step you’ve taken as a family.
Pop Ups
After a two year hiatus on pop-ups, we made a return to the streets of Hong Kong with our first pop-up in busy Causeway Bay in July 2021. We loved our time there so much that we are making a return to the same location in January!
Following the success of our summer pop-up, we held a Fall pop-up on Hollywood Road in Central Hong Kong in October 2021 and loved seeing so many community members.
We were fortunate that Covid restrictions and cases were at an all time low in Hong Kong so we also brought back our popular Festive Family Shoot and said thank you to our wonderful Retyklers with over 150 free family shoots with professional photographers, John McGrane Photography & Gillian Nadel Gaughan.
New Ways to Retykle
We are always open to and interested to address other ways to make Retykling easier and more accessible to other categories. We had received many requests to start offering our service for toys so we started piloting this year and we’re happy to report that we will be permanently offering this category and will be spending more time and energy to build it out in the coming year.
We have been asked since we opened to tackle secondhand uniforms. We began a pilot with The ISF Academy and Kellett School and will be opening up the service to more schools in the new year.
Geographic Expansion
We did it! We opened our first overseas market - Singapore! We localised our service with a new website retykle.sg to offer our service locally with the lowest possible carbon footprint. We look forward to opening more countries and bringing Retykle global.
Ambassadors
We welcomed over 20 new ambassadors this year and enjoyed spending time together, building the brand and community together and most importantly receiving feedback.
Want to join the program? Apply here
Carbon Neutral Certification
We want to ensure accountability for our actions and impact on the environment to ensure that we are treading as lightly as possible with our operations. To that end, we sought to offset the carbon emissions that we are responsible for primarily via packaging and shipping through carbon offsets. We achieved carbon neutral status via Carbon Neutral and have committed to further means of reduction in the coming year.
OUR TEAM
Since we launched, our team has grown and changed as some team members have come and gone but each person that spends time on our team adds a patch to our growing quilt. We are humbled by your comments and reviews which point to our dedication to serve you with the highest integrity.
GIVING BACK
We are fortunate to work with incredible charities who work tirelessly for our community. Retykle is able to support our charity partners in two ways; Monetary Support where sellers can opt to donate their earnings to any one of our charity partners, instead of receiving cash or credit for their sold items and via Clothing Donations where sellers can donate any unsold or unaccepted items directly to our charity partners as in kind donations. Since we launched, we have donated over 50,000 items of clothing to our various partners and our community of Retykle Sellers have supported charities with significant monetary donations from their earnings.
2022 Year Ahead
BUILD A MOVEMENT
We are proud of what we do and we hope you are too. We want to continue building on Retykling until it becomes a habit in your lives that creates shared value for all those who participate. We won't stop working tirelessly to create a solution that simplifies and improves your lives.
GO CIRCULAR WITH BRANDS
We want to make Retykling easier and more rewarding for sellers, shoppers AND brands. We will be introducing new ways for brands to participate in secondhand with us.
REMOVE ALL PLASTIC FROM OUR SUPPLY CHAIN
We have a few pesky plastics in our supply chain. We have not yet found a viable storage alternative to reusable plastic storage bags but are determined to continue researching until we find one.
GEOGRAPHIC EXPANSION
We are looking ahead to opening our next markets in the year ahead.
ACHIEVE BCORP CERTIFICATION
We want to build a best in class company for our employees and community. Working by the principles of BCorp are a way in which we will seek to be accountable to the highest standards of ethics in business.
RECYCLING CLOTHING
We want to take Retykling to the next level of circularity by transforming damaged clothing into inputs for something new. We're aiming to go 100% circular with you through imagination and innovation.
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