Hello I’m Jacey, the founder of Qookeee, our baby & toddler clothing rental store. Qookeee launched on the 1st July 2020 and we’ve been dressing babies up and down the UK ever since.
Before Qookeee I was a Technical Manager in the Fashion Industry, working in a busy buying office and visiting factories overseas. I saw 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 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 reduce the amount of new clothing you buy. 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.
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.
And when we say our cotton baby clothes are organic, you can be sure they are, because they will carry the GOTS (Global Organic Textile Standard) certified organic cotton logo. So you’ll know that you’re choosing real organic cotton that’s checked through every part of the supply chain. The cotton has been 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.
Because our customers return all items to us we are able to control where they go when they are no longer suitable for renting. Clothes 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 £5 a month which includes free delivery and return with every order.
Read more about our sustainability aims here, and how our story is progressing in our news feed.