One of the Deane team’s favourite ways of putting sustainability into practice is making it easy for customers to give preloved Deane uniforms a second life.

A good example is a New Zealand Government department which, out of respect for the customer’s own policies, we won’t name here.  A customer since 2016, it dresses 2300 of its people in somewhere north of 50 Deane styles. Many of those garments, particularly those worn by contractors and volunteers in short-term engagements, have plenty of life left in them when their owners move on, and the department has long reallocated them to new owners. That process, which relied on spreadsheets manually updated by a uniform staff member, was never terribly efficient so the customer last year started to look at developing an online platform specifically to manage it.

We had another idea: Why not use Silk, Deane’s customer-facing uniform ordering and management system, instead?

“The organisation had been using Silk for new stock since 2018, so it was familiar with the platform,” Shalyn Kumar, the Deane’s account manager responsible for the account, says. “Plus, the system already exists, so it would save the cost of building and testing a new inventory management system from scratch. The organisation saw the logic and said yes, and in February this year it switched over to what we call Silk Preloved.”

Preloved is integrated into the organisation’s existing Silk portal, which means users log into the same system to order both new and used Deane uniforms, with the preloved garments presented as the default. On average, half of all orders are for preloved uniforms.

Deane and the customer worked together on the transition to its iteration of Silk Preloved, and its day-to-day operation is just as collaborative. Deane trains the organisation’s administrators who are the primary users of the system and uploads fortnightly stock reports on its behalf. There are also plenty of opportunities to fine-tune the platform, including a quarterly uniform steering meeting between the stakeholders.

The department tells us Preloved has sharply reduced the manual overhead of a process that used to be both time-consuming and prone to human error. It’s cost-effective, much easier to manage and it reduces textile waste by making better use of a resource the department already has.

There’s a downstream benefit, too: Silk captures data about the styles and sizes that are in demand, which means it is easier to spot changes in, for example, size profiles. The result is that the department can predict uniform requirements and order with precision, so it has stock on hand when it’s needed but far fewer garments sitting on the shelves. When you’re talking about orders in the hundreds of thousands of dollars, the department says, that’s a saving worth having.