Goldwin's repair-and-upcycling club widens to families with a Karimoku wood-offcut workshop
Goldwin's own account of its Repair Club shows the circularity initiative widening from adult sewing sessions to a family workshop built on offcuts from furniture maker Karimoku -- a cheap way to make sustainability something a customer experiences inside the company's own Tokyo headquarters, rather than a line in a report.
Goldwin Inc. used an October 13 post on its own newsroom to describe how its Repair Club initiative, run from an event space on the first floor of its Tokyo headquarters, has widened from adult sewing sessions to a children's workshop built around offcuts from furniture maker Karimoku Furniture Co.
That session, "Animal Karimoku with Goldwin," ran August 14-15, pairing Karimoku's wood offcuts with Goldwin's own garment-fabric offcuts so families could build animal figures together -- a format Goldwin said opened the club to preschool and early-elementary children who could not take part in the sewing-based sessions it had run before. An earlier June session with BELAY Inc. focused on hand-washing technique for waterproof outerwear and promoted an outdoor-gear detergent that Goldwin's Tech Lab developed with BELAY and has sold in its own directly run stores since late March; Brother Sales Co. lent home sewing machines at each session. Goldwin did not disclose attendance or sales figures for any of the three sessions held so far.
None of this moves product the way a launch or a store opening does, but a Japanese apparel maker turning its own headquarters into a recurring family event space, rather than confining repair and offcuts to a factory process, is a cheap way to make circularity something a customer experiences rather than a line in a sustainability report.