Hello I’m Jacey, the founder of Qookeee, our baby & toddler clothing rental store.
Before Qookeee I was a Technical Manager in the Fashion Industry, working in a busy buying office and visiting factories overseas, I could see first hand the amount of clothing waste generated by fashion. It wasn’t just the clothes themselves but the business model that created the excess and generated a throwaway culture.
I quickly realised that to make clothing truly sustainable requires a change of mindset, with design integrity built in from the start and consideration for the whole product lifecycle, including what happens to the clothing when they are no longer required by the consumer.
Fashion thrives on the concept of buy, use, throw away. I wanted to give parents another choice in how they shop, an alternative to the constant cycle of buying and discarding barely worn baby clothes.
Welcome to Qookeee, our baby & toddler clothing rental store.
Our store is all about offering you an alternative to buying clothing. After all, there’s very little choice isn’t there?
Buy second hand.
Buy cheap fast fashion baby clothes.
Buy expensive sustainable baby clothes.
You still have to deal with all those clothes when your baby outgrows them!
So why buy clothes that your baby will outgrow in a few months when you can hire them from Qookeee instead?
Qookeee offers you a selection of beautiful sustainable baby wear, in sizes up to 24 months, which you can rent at a fraction of the retail price. By renting you are reducing waste by reusing garments.
Our online subscription store for baby and toddler wear rental, is set up like an online shop, where you simply rent the items in your cart instead of buying them! Your subscription amount is based on the sum of the monthly rental cost of the items you select. Find out more here.
Why we’re doing this
In the UK, we discard around 300,000 tonnes of textiles a year, with a large amount ending up in landfill or being incinerated. There is so much waste in baby wear, as the lifespan of the clothing is very short with children growing so quickly.
Our aim is to help transition a move from the linear to the circular, where clothing is reused, re-manufactured or donated prolonging its life and with an aim to prevent the clothing reaching landfill.
By renting baby clothes you extend the life of the clothing and by doing so you reduce the need to buy new clothing. This reduces the need for so much clothing to be made. So all the water, waste and carbon used in making the clothing in the first place is saved. The longer an item is rented the greater the savings. Track your impact using our eco calculator to see how much you could save by renting baby clothes.
How we’re doing it
To make this work we can only use high quality products. We source from responsible brands that have sustainability at their core, who are working hard to develop products that have quality, longevity and sustainability values. We buy new stock and make it available for you to rent, saving you money, reducing waste and helping the planet.
All our 100% organic cotton clothing comes from responsible brands that use GOTS (Global Organic Textile Standard) certified organic cotton, grown naturally and sustainably, without using pesticides or harmful chemicals. Fabrics are certified to Oekotex 100 which confirms that no harmful dyes are used, making our organic cotton ideal for sensitive baby skin.
Every item in our Conscious wear collection has sustainable attributes and as our customers return all items to us we are able to control where they go when they are no longer suitable for renting.
Garments made of one fibre have the potential to be used in remanufacturing fabric, because the garment fabric can be broken down and reproduced. Items consisting of more than one fibre are harder to break down and reproduce, so when these items can no longer be rented out, they will be either upcycled or reused via donation.
We know that some of you may be new to renting, which is why we have a super low subscription of just £10 a month which includes free delivery and return. You can make up your subscription in several ways, perhaps a Capsule of organic essentials, with some add ons from our Conscious wear collection, or make up a subscription from just the Conscious Wear Collection. You can be as creative as you want!
Read more about our Conscious Wear and sustainability aims here, and how our story is progressing in our news feed.
Thank you for reading about Qookeee®. We are just starting our adventure and will be adding more brands and items to our site as we develop our collection.