Key takeaways
- Tersus permits main vogue manufacturers to scale their resale and restore packages by progressive, low-impact cleansing and logistics providers.
- Its liquid CO2 cleansing know-how reduces waste and preserves product high quality, preserving attire in circulation longer.
- Investing in round infrastructure helps manufacturers discover new income streams whereas assembly client demand and satisfying rising laws.
Tersus Options kinds, cleans and ships clothes and sneakers for the branded resale storefronts of about three dozen firms, together with The North Face, Patagonia, Dr Martens and Eileen Fisher. Gadgets by Lululemon, its newest accomplice, are shortly filling up the corporate’s distribution heart at its headquarters in Englewood, Colorado.
The key ingredient in its high-pressure washing machines is carbon dioxide, which it recaptures and recirculates for future cleansing cycles. This low-impact, practically waterless manner of spiffing up used merchandise has enabled Tersus to change into a linchpin within the rising round economic system for outside manufacturers and modern vogue.
“That is how a model can disrupt itself,” stated CEO Peter Whitcomb. “You already made a product, now get extra use out of it. It’s an annuity.”
On-line resale grew by 23 p.c final 12 months and will attain $40 billion within the U.S. by 2029, in line with the ThredUp 2025 Resale Report launched in March. In 2019 solely a handful of manufacturers ran resale storefronts. Now it’s greater than 160.
Tersus is poised to experience that progress wave, particularly if the White Home’s erratic tariff actions drive extra consumers to secondhand. The corporate additionally expects the 25,000 repairs it handles yearly to climb shortly. One nudge is California’s prolonged producer duty laws, which in July 2026 begins requiring attire firms to take motion on merchandise after their finish of use. Trending right-to-repair laws could present one other increase.
“There are all these alternative ways by which they’re turning into the hub for the way forward for circularity,” stated Nancy Rhodes, co-founder and CEO of New York startup Alternew. Her firm introduced on April 23 a partnership with Tersus to check how the 2 can use tailors throughout the U.S.
E-commerce resale packages — akin to The North Face Renewed and Dr Martens Rewair — make up a small fraction of manufacturers’ general gross sales. And types like them as a result of quite than cannibalizing gross sales of latest objects secondhand listings entice budget-hampered shoppers to manufacturers they in any other case couldn’t afford.
Tersus’s three companies embrace secondhand cleansing, repairs and transport for manufacturers; decontaminating chemical-laden firefighting gear for fireplace departments; and recycling down, which it sells to manufacturers or wholesalers. The corporate turns over greater than 90 p.c of what it processes in a given month.
“Zero issues we contact go to landfill,” stated Whitcomb, noting that objects that it could’t rescue or remake wind up donated or recycled. Tersus not too long ago expanded its house for sorting, cleansing and transport to roughly 100,000 sq. ft.
The again story
As the top of round commerce at REI earlier than the COVID pandemic, Whitcomb wanted to scrub 100,000 sleeping luggage for the model’s rental program. He contacted Steve Madsen, who had developed a novel technique of dry cleansing that he spun into Tersus Options in 2009. Madsen had constructed relationships with outside manufacturers together with the Worn Put on resale program that launched in 2012 for Patagonia, Tersus’s greatest exterior investor.
After a stint main partnerships with San Francisco-based reverse logistics firm Trove, Whitcomb joined Tersus as president in 2021.
Tersus handles attire and footwear principally from client returns. That features new-condition objects rejected for measurement or coloration. “Somebody wore these, however they nonetheless have the tag,” Whitcomb stated, holding up sneakers, related at an unwalkable distance by a tag. “It is a frequent use case.”
Different incoming merchandise contains older garments and sneakers that individuals returned to a model’s take-back program in alternate for retailer credit score. Tersus additionally repairs items broken whereas below guarantee.
Over the previous six months, extra firms have been asking about restore choices. That’s a large shift, in line with Tersus.
The fabric circulate
Delivered by way of truck, row after row of packing containers full of returns from from a number of manufacturers occupy Tersus’ plant ground.
“We see all kinds of bizarre stuff,” Whitcomb stated, like trucked shipments contaminated by mildew or garlic. Tersus lays out rancid-smelling objects within the sunshine earlier than bringing them indoors, piece by piece.
Every product’s path by Tersus begins when a employees member inspects, identifies and grades its situation, logging particulars into computer systems operating Archive or Trove software program. They add a bar code tag to the within of the garment for monitoring functions.
Digital product passports that assign distinctive identifiers to new merchandise may ultimately eradicate this guide labor, however Whitcomb doesn’t anticipate that to occur quickly. That’s as a result of Tersus typically processes objects which can be a decade or two outdated. Some could cycle by greater than as soon as, he famous.
Items ultimately land subsequent door within the success heart for transport. Tersus ships out tens of hundreds of merchandise every month.
The know-how
Tersus tosses practically all attire and sneakers, bag by bag, into its liquid CO2 cleansing machines, about 100 kilos at a time. It neither makes use of conventional dry cleansing chemical compounds, such because the not too long ago banned perchloroethylene, nor the solvents utilized by “inexperienced” dry cleansing retailers.
Madsen, Tersus founder and chief know-how officer, invented a low-waste cleansing system. The CO2 machines appear like common laundry gear on steroids, with their innards uncovered on the edges. As inner stress builds to as much as 950 kilos per sq. inch, the CO2 gasoline liquifies. The machines run at near room temperature. The unique prototype, from 2011, nonetheless runs each day.
The washing drum jostles the clothes gently. This preserves garment colours and water repellent coatings, and sheds minimal microfibers, in line with Madsen, who added that stains and oils simply come off. On the finish of the cleansing, stress comes down, returning the CO2 to gasoline kind. Gadgets come out cool and dry.
The corporate reuses 96 p.c of the CO2 and captures microfibers and chemical compounds akin to per- and polyfluoroalkyls (PFAS).
After cleansing, the images lab often paperwork garments with distinctive options or flaws.
The North Face, 20 minutes away in Denver, occupies a particular nook of the Tersus plant. Right here, the outside model’s Remade creations, akin to jackets with mismatched sleeves and bodice, emerge from melding imperfect clothes. “5 years in the past, these would have gone to an incinerator,” Whitcomb stated of remodeled jackets.
This differs from mundane repairs that restore attire to like-new situation. A refurbished shirt, for instance, may characteristic Tersus’s personal stitching thread, or an industry-standard YKK zipper as a substitute of 1 with a branded pull.
Common restore time is 13 minutes. Tersus sends restore information, which may reveal failure patterns in garment manufacturing, to clients.
As soon as an merchandise is able to ship, a staffer wraps a branded paper “stomach band” round it and slips it right into a plastic mailer. The return tackle is Tersus Options.
