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Roxanne, a guest on a podcast, introduces herself and her company, Seconso, which helps businesses deal with textile waste through recycling and upcycling. She discusses the importance of protecting resources in the textile industry and the need to consider social challenges as well. She shares the story of how Seconso started and offers advice on identifying impactful entrepreneurial opportunities. She explains the problems Seconso addresses and how they measure their impact. Roxanne also discusses the importance of building a responsible organization and making sustainable choices. Finally, she explains how they made their venture economically viable through careful calculations of margins. Roxanne, welcome to our podcast. Thank you. Hi. Hi. How are you doing this evening? I'm good. Thank you. How are you? I'm doing good as well. So thank you so much for having us here. Okay. Let's quickly start with the questions. So can you please introduce yourself and briefly present your company? Yes. My name is Roxanne. As you said, I'm 34 years old. I live in Nantes. And my company, Seconso, is a company that helps other businesses deal with their textile waste. We help them find the best way to recycle or reuse the waste that they have. And we have a specialization in upcycling. So we transform their waste, such as personal clothes, working clothes, into textile products that they can use again in their company. So we can, for example, transform a jacket into a computer case. Okay. That's interesting. Thank you so much. So what is, for you, an impactful entrepreneur who takes environmental and social challenges into account? So in my field of work, textile, I think an impactful entrepreneur is someone who protects resources. So in textile, the cloth and the fabric are too often thought as disposable. So you create cotton, polyester, or any type of fabric. You make a cloth, and you throw it away. So that's what we call fast fashion. So if you take into account resources, you will know that this fabric is precious because it took so many resources to create, water, space, landfill, human resources. And you won't want to throw it away immediately. So our company has, we have done a huge shift in the last month, but the problem is always the same. It's how to protect our resources. We used to be a clothing brand. So we used to create clothing for kids and babies out of old linen, bedsheets, fabrics that already had a previous life. And in that way, we were fully into the circular economy. So in textile, I think it's the most important is to think circular. You don't create something and throw it away, but you reuse it, you transform it, and you have it live a full, long life with many uses. And really often, social challenges are not taken into account at all, at least in what I can observe in France. There are a lot of regulations and new opportunities for organizations to put some indicators in their reporting about environmental changes, CO2, water, et cetera, how they preserve the environment. But they never take into account the quality of life, the salary, and the health issues of the people who produce our textile and fabric, most of the time in Asian countries. So someone, an impactful entrepreneur, would have to take all of this into account to protect and preserve our environment and the people on this planet. So Roxane, can you please tell us the story behind Second Sew? Yes. So my business partner, Camille, she started the company when her first daughter was born. She was looking for a way to dress her without damaging the planet. So instead of buying new clothes, she decided to sew clothes from curtains and fabrics that she already had in her home. Her mom used to work for a textile company, so they knew what they were doing. And her life partner works in antiques. So they like having objects and fabrics that have a history. That's how the company started. She started sewing for her daughter, and then her friends wanted to buy from her. So she made it into a business. That's really interesting. Thank you so much. So the next question we would like to know, based on your experience, how aspiring entrepreneurs can identify or recognize an impactful and responsible entrepreneurial opportunity? So it's a great question. I think it's not an easy one, because if it was so easy, everybody would do it right away. So as I told you, we actually started with the clothing brand, but it's not enough to have an idea that you like and that everybody likes. You can start building a business, but it takes more factors to make it work. In the case of our fashion brand for kids, if you want to make it sustainable, made in France, et cetera, the price will be high to pay for customers to buy your clothes. And in the context of fast fashion, even when people want to fight against fast fashion, they will have this temptation to buy cheap clothes, especially for kids, because you know it won't last long. They will wear it for six months. So in order to identify an impactful entrepreneurial opportunity, you really have to take the market into account, and where will the money come from for people who buy your service. In our case, we had a demand from companies who asked us if we could use our knowledge in upcycling to work on professional clothing. In that moment, it becomes interesting, because we know that companies have money to spend to make their business more responsible. It's not always been that number one priority, because they have to make their product, but it's a trend. Nobody can escape this trend. They have to be more responsible, and we are in the middle of changing the legislation as well, because in 2025, companies will have to sort and have their textile waste collected. It's becoming compulsory. I think it's important to look at what the legislation is, where will the money come from, who will buy your product, and where is there a lack of service, a lack of product. It's not revolutionary, but it's more often than not, you will not succeed the first time. You will try a product or service, and you will have to adjust it little by little, because the first idea, it's never the good one. You have to try and take everything that your client or community says, you have to take it into account and improve and improve. The idea is important, but the process is more important. Could you briefly explain us what is the problem that you're addressing, and how do you measure your impact on the problem you solve? We are actually addressing three issues. The first one is the overproduction of textiles. We make so many clothes that we don't even wear all of them. We buy and we throw. The second one is the working condition of the people who make the clothes, and that's why we do everything made in France. The third one is the textile waste that we don't know how to manage, where to put in the landfill, and that many times we send to other countries. We measure the impact of our products and our organization by working with an agency that is separate from us, which is called Label Emprunte. They have developed a way of calculating the indicators of your impact compared to when you buy something new. That's how they calculated that when you make an upcycled, let's say, dress for a little girl, the emission of carbon is 92% less compared to when you buy a new one. They do that with carbon, but also with pollution of water and several other indicators that we can use to measure the impact. Actually, what we measure there is the economy that we do compared to buying something brand new. We also measure how much waste we avoid by just weighing the textile that we use, which used to be a waste that is now a resource, and then we can measure how many hours of work we paid for, for people who work in France, for example. We have different ways of measuring it. In the B2B business, what we do with companies for their textile waste is exactly the same thing because they buy far too many working clothes. It's less visible, but it's also very important because one out of five workers wear working clothes. That's a lot of clothes. Most of the time, they replace it before it's worn, before it's used. Sometimes, they throw away brand new clothing because they changed their logo, their name, et cetera. This happens very, very often. Or they hire somebody for, let's say, one month. They give them working clothes, and after one month, instead of giving the clothes to someone else, they just throw it away. For a big company, it's thousands of clothes every year that are thrown away without reason. We measure exactly the same way, how much waste we avoid, and when we make new products like a computer case, exactly the same way we measure how much waste of resources we avoided by making it up-cycled instead of brand new. In your view, what do you think? How do you build an emerging responsible organization to support an entrepreneurial opportunity? When you have an opportunity to start a business, if you want to make it responsible, in my opinion, you need to look at every part of it separately and try to make it responsible. It's a very big work, but for example, I think the most important would be sourcing of your products, of the materials that you are using. Where is it from? What is it made of? Is it toxic? Does it take a lot of resources? How you can replace this by something more sustainable. For each type of product, you have to adapt the criteria that you are using to measure it. It can be beneficial to work with independent organizations, like agencies that measure impact, but most of the time, you will be starting a business, so you won't have a lot of money to do that. You can find some... How do you say that? You can find some help, financial help, from governmental organizations like ADEM, etc. And if you work with services and not products, either you will have to hire people who provide a service, like any cleaning service, building service, anything like that, and you want to make it responsible, you will have to look at how you can protect these people. In my opinion, you really have to... If you are a leader, someone who runs their business, you have to take care of the people who work with you. You have to take care of your material and everything, just as much as the people. Everything on an equal basis. You have to be responsible for them. Thank you so much for enlightening us. Okay. So, could you please briefly explain how did you manage to make your venture economically viable? So, when my business partner started SecondSue, it was theoretically economically viable, meaning that all the margins were calculated, all the production costs, everything was well established in a business plan and economically viable, but you have to reach a certain amount of product sold to make it work, and this didn't happen for the clothing brand. So, yes, you have to take into account this factor that not everything is going to work the way you want and be flexible. That's why we shifted to the B2B offer, and in this case, it's a little bit different because once you start a project or contract with a client, you start with a lot more products. So, you don't sell your products one by one, but you sell them maybe 200 by 200, or maybe your client will ask you for 10,000 products or 30,000 products. We have been asked to transform eight tons of textile waste. So, it makes a huge difference in making your business viable. It's a little bit easier to make it profitable in the long run, and you can have a... So, what's really important when you have a business is to keep your customer year after year instead of just doing one shot, right? Because acquiring a customer takes a lot of energy, time, and money. So, when we have our clothing brand, we need to acquire each customer one by one and keep them in the long run, which is not easy because their children are growing, and we were doing from zero to six years old. So, after six years old, we don't have products anymore. In the case of our B2B business, the collaboration is never ending with higher quantities. So, that's one part. And the second part with the businesses is that we found more opportunities to use our knowledge in textile waste management and make this a service. So, we can go into companies and talk to the workers, do brainstorming, co-creation, workshops. We can give some consulting services, and they would pay for that, and that's 100% margin. So, the consulting services are also a way to make it valuable. Thank you so much for your insights. Okay. So, how do you want to write the future of Sequency in maybe next 10 years? So, the first step to write this next chapter is to change the title because we will change the name of our business. Sequency was the clothing brand. We are working with a communication agency to have a whole new identity with a new business name, website, visual identity, etc., that will serve more our interest as a B2B brand. We have the ambition to expand our business within the limits of our country. We don't necessarily want to make it a worldwide venture, mostly because it makes more sense to be local, to work with local workshops, to make the clothes, local companies, etc., that we would be more than happy to talk to companies who do the same thing in neighboring countries and share our knowledge, but we will mostly stay in the local area. We are not entirely sure. By having more customers and more production, we might want to internalize production and have a workshop of our own. This is an interesting question, I think, for future business leaders, whether you work with externalized partners or you internalize, because in our case, we are very flexible working with workshops. When we have low production, we don't spend money in maintaining employees and machines and any stock area for products. We don't have this cost. When we have a high demand of production, we can use our workshop, one of them, two of them, three of them, in the same time if we want. Sometimes, you are more fast in responding to inquiry and you can make things more personalized or easily if you have your own production for internalized. It's going to be a question that we will have to address, I think, every two or three years. We'll have to ask ourselves, do we have to continue like that or have a little bit of production internalized? Then, as per the product, we will want to do the same thing, textile products. There will never be a shortage of textile waste, unfortunately. What companies do right now is that they start reducing their textile consumption. It's very good. They do less a tote bag that they give you and that is useless and you will never use it. They do less of this, but they will always need working clothes, protective clothing in the building industry, in the manufacturers, in every industry. We will always have this to work from and make other textile products from. This will not change. Yes, that's how I see the future. Thank you so much. Okay, that is a really bright future that you envision about SecondSue. My question may be a little bit pessimistic. Would the legislation be in alignment with your plans? Of course, it will be. It's already started. Unless there is a huge shift, but it's not going to happen because now the whole population is aware that we have to change the way we are working in our industries and companies. By doing a B2B business, I talk to customers every day and they do a lot of changes. They are more and more responsible with the materials they use, the positions. They measure everything and they try to reduce their negative impact on the planet. The legislation is going in the same direction. I told you about the obligation to collect textile waste next year, but there are also rules about reporting. The CSRD and extra financial reporting are put more and more into place. I think soon they will become compulsory for more and more companies. I'm very convinced that the legislation is going in that direction only and not going backwards. Okay, thank you so much. That's really interesting what you said, but can you please let us know what will change this for your company to be specific? This will be very beneficial for us because it means that probably the companies will have to pay more attention to their sourcing and buy products that are made more responsibly. That's a solution that we offer them. It's already started because right now, today in France, a lot of state organizations or regionals or departmentals or even like cities, they have to include 30% of responsible assets. 30% of what they buy has to be responsible. It's already started. For companies, it will force them to look into different ways of buying. When we make circular economy, we are 100% into this trend. It might be financial incitations for companies like us or financial incitations like tax reduction or such as for the businesses that do this effort, but mostly it will be beneficial for us to expand our work. Thank you. Thank you so much for a detailed answer. Thanks.
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