The Data Behind Circular Fashion in cities

Fashion’s circular transition is often discussed in terms of legislation, innovation and consumer behaviour. Yet another question may prove just as important: Who owns the data that will shape future decisions?

Belgian platform COSH! is working on a different way of looking at retail. Originally launched to help consumers discover fashion brands based on a range of sustainability criteria, the platform has evolved into a Smart City project that maps local retail ecosystems, from repair services and independent designers to resale. Along the way, founder Niki de Shryver found herself questioning how retail data is collected today and unexpectedly entering a space largely shaped by commercial real estate intelligence.

We spoke about the Leuven pilot project, why better data could become one of fashion’s most valuable resources, and why understanding what prevents waste may ultimately matter more than measuring waste itself.

COSH! originally started as a platform to help consumers make more informed fashion choices. How did that evolve into a Smart City project?

When I first launched COSH!, the idea was to create the Pokémon Go of sustainable shopping. I still smile when I talk about it because that really was the vision.

You would walk through a city, hold up your phone and immediately see which brands or shops matched certain sustainability criteria, making more informed choices much easier. Cities were actually part of the idea from day one.

I always believed that if you want to change fashion, you have to connect every stakeholder. Brands, supply chains, retailers, consumers, local governments and, eventually, European policymakers. We started COSH! before the European Green Deal for Textiles, before the legislation we’re discussing today even existed.

Once you start connecting all that information, you realise that cities can become much more than places where people shop. They become ecosystems. If you understand what’s happening locally, you can support retailers, help consumers navigate their choices and give policymakers a much clearer picture of what’s actually happening on the ground.

So that broader ecosystem was always the plan.

Yes. The challenge was simply that, as an entrepreneur, you can’t build everything at once. I always say we had to chop our product roadmap into thousands of little pieces. Looking back, I’d say we’re about halfway through that roadmap.

I can imagine not everyone immediately believed in that vision.

Not at all. When I first presented the concept to accelerators, one of them literally wrote on an internal document: ​“Don’t fund. Crazy. It’s not going to happen.” It wasn’t even supposed to reach me, but somehow it did.

The startit accelerator took a much more practical approach. They helped us identify our minimum viable product. At that stage, it wasn’t this whole ecosystem. It was simply a website where retailers could create a profile and increase their visibility.

The bigger vision never disappeared, though. We simply had to build it step by step.

Reading comments like that must have been difficult. How do you deal with setbacks?

My psychologist recently asked me exactly the same question. (Laughs.) The honest answer is that I don’t really process it. It hurts like hell. For a while I get angry. But either way, I continue. Entrepreneurship isn’t an easy ride, that’s for sure. You constantly have to find your motivation again. I always compare it to water. You try to steer the current, but eventually you hit rocks. Then you simply find another way around them. In the end, the water always keeps flowing. Resilience and problem-solving are two key skills. 

It certainly seems to. Today you’re working directly with cities. Why do local governments matter in this conversation?

Because they’re much closer to the actual transition than people often realise. In the Netherlands, for example, cities already have textile strategies. That makes it easier to start conversations because the topic already exists politically, even though finding the right person is still a challenge. People are often gatekeeping connections and networks to stay in control. It’s a systemic issue of doing business with scarcity mindsets.

Belgium is very different. Local governments generally don’t have large budgets for retail projects. If funding exists, it’s usually relatively small and often linked to marketing initiatives rather than long-term structural change. SME Retailers, however, need something else they need long term strategies and time to change. A half-year one-off project in fashion isn’t enough to make meaningful change. You need consistency in the plans. If, as a city, your dot on the horizon is clear the group of retailers moves along with the vision. 

Many independent businesses don’t simply need another shopping weekend. They need visibility. They need support. They need to prepare for a future that is becoming increasingly shaped by new European legislation.

That’s where we saw an opportunity. Instead of creating another marketing campaign, we wanted to help cities understand their own retail ecosystems through data and help hands-on.

Your first Smart City kick-off was with Leuven, right?

Yes. The Smart City pilot in Leuven became our city dashboard data-driven retail starting point. The Province of Flemish Brabant launches Smart City calls every year. Five projects receive funding, but every project also has to provide fifty per cent co-financing. So, in reality, many of these projects are partly financed through our own time. Once we had developed the dashboard for Leuven, though, something important happened. The infrastructure is now there. If another city wants to work with us, we don’t have to start from scratch anymore. The dashboard already exists. The methodology exists. What we now need to keep expanding is the data. That also means cities don’t need to build an entirely new system themselves. We aim to do the heavy lifting.

Sometimes there’s a local retail manager who already knows the retailers personally, and that relationship is incredibly valuable. But when it comes to collecting, structuring and analysing the information, that’s what we do.

Data can feel quite abstract. What kind of information are you actually collecting?

We research brands’ supply chains ourselves and assess them against our own methodology. For the Leuven project, we screened roughly thirty additional brands, but we already had a database of around one thousand assessed brands before hand. That information allows us to build a much broader picture. 
We’re currently looking into accelerating that process by connecting Digital Product Passport information and automating parts of the assessment. It’s probably still a little early to go into detail, but that’s clearly where we’re heading. 

The interesting part is that this kind of information doesn’t only become valuable for consumers. It also becomes valuable for cities.

At one point, your work led you to a different question altogether: how cities actually collect retail data. That seems to have changed your perspective quite significantly.

It really did. One thing we noticed is that, although cities or provinces often have very limited budgets to support retail, they do invest quite heavily in collecting retail data. That’s when we came across Locatus, a Dutch organisation that has been mapping retail landscapes for many years. 
Their teams literally walk through cities, documenting retail spaces. They record whether a business is a fashion store, a restaurant or a repair shop, they measure retail floor space and monitor vacancies. That information is then used in official government statistics.

Initially, we wanted to combine that data with our own research. But very quickly we discovered a number of problems.

Such as?
Some of the information was inaccurate. More importantly, it wasn’t detailed enough for the circular textile transition Europe is now working towards.

For example, a repair business was simply classified as a repair business. There was no distinction between someone repairing phones, electronics, shoes or clothing. If you’re trying to understand how a circular textile ecosystem functions, those differences suddenly become incredibly important.

Why does that level of detail matter so much?

Because once you start looking at circularity, you need to understand much more than whether a shop exists. You need to know where garments can be repaired. Where people can resell them. Where local makers are working. Where independent designers are based. Without that information, it’s very difficult to understand how a city’s retail ecosystem is actually evolving. We realised that those layers simply weren’t visible. The system was tailored 

It seems the deeper you looked, the more unexpected findings emerged.

Oh, yes. Normally, if a city already pays for retail data, you still have to pay again if you want access to it yourself. So we contacted them and asked what their plans were for the circular economy. We wanted to understand how repair services and similar activities would eventually become part of future datasets.

During those conversations, we learned that the company had been acquired by Green Street in the United States. According to the information we received, Green Street specialises in commercial real estate intelligence and advises international investors on retail property markets driving property rents up. 
When I looked at that, I realised our priorities were completely different. We’re trying to understand how local circular ecosystems function. Their business serves a very different purpose.

A US company influencing access to retail data in Belgium must have been quite a moment.

It was. What worried me most wasn’t simply the ownership. It was the realisation that the information guiding future investment decisions isn’t necessarily the information needed for a circular textile economy. If we want more local production, more repair services and longer product lifetimes, we also need data that reflects those activities. Otherwise, they remain invisible.

What happened after that?

We approached the Flemish Innovation Office and asked what opportunities existed for companies working with this type of data. The answer surprised us even more. 
They basically told us: ​“Stay away from this market. It’s an oligopoly.”

That says a lot. How did this make you feel?

It was absolutely frustrating. Sometimes it feels like fighting a giant you simply can’t beat. But at the same time, it reinforced why this work matters. Data isn’t neutral.

The questions you ask determine the answers you’ll receive. If you only measure vacancies and retail floor space, that’s the reality you’ll optimise for. But if you also start measuring repair services, local designers, resale, garment care and other circular activities, you begin seeing a completely different picture of a city’s economy. We have been building on the data since 2018 for Belgium, Netherlands and Germany hence seeing clear evolutions. 

So did the Leuven pilot challenge some common assumptions about retail?

Very much so. One of the biggest surprises was that retail decline wasn’t limited to businesses positioned around sustainability. Looking at the Leuven pilot, the trend appeared similar across retail more broadly. We also found that some of the public narratives around repair services weren’t necessarily reflected in what we observed locally.

People often assume repair is disappearing altogether. What we actually saw was movement. One business closes. Another opens somewhere else. The ecosystem changes, but it doesn’t necessarily disappear.

So perception and reality don’t always match.

Exactly. Social media amplifies that gap. When a retailer closes, it’s completely understandable that they share their story online. People respond with empathy. Friends comment. Customers express their support. But those posts also perform very well algorithmically. The result is that negative stories travel much further than positive ones. Meanwhile, businesses that quietly continue, adapt or succeed rarely receive the same attention. I think that’s creating a distorted perception of retail.

There’s almost a psychological chain reaction.

Yes. One entrepreneur sees another giving up and starts wondering whether they should stop as well. That chain reaction is something we shouldn’t underestimate. We’ve become very good at talking about failure. We’re much less likely to talk about the businesses that quietly keep going, adapt or succeed. Those stories deserve attention too.

Beyond the pilot itself, what concerns you most when you look at independent fashion retail today?

One thing we’ve observed consistently over the years is how difficult it has become for small retailers to survive. Every year, shops close. That’s nothing new. Retail has always evolved. One business closes because someone retires, another opens somewhere else. That in itself isn’t unusual. What worries me more is how many small sustainable businesses never seem to get beyond those first three or four years.

Very often, people invest their own savings, hoping to build something meaningful. Then, after a few years without making enough money, they simply can’t continue. 

We often talk about exploitation at the manufacturing end of the fashion industry. But there’s another side we don’t discuss nearly enough. Many independent retailers carry enormous financial risks themselves, investing private money into businesses that may never become profitable.

The middle ground has become incredibly difficult. Either businesses remain very small and build a loyal community that allows them to survive, or they grow much much much bigger due to external or family investments. Everything in between seems increasingly challenging.

“Today, the focus is often on what happens once clothing has already become waste. To me, that’s far too late.”

Does digitalisation make that any easier?

It can. What we still see, especially among older retailers, is a significant digital gap. Some businesses still don’t have a functioning webshop, or they’re using very small local platforms that generate very little traffic. We’ve consistently observed that retailers using established e‑commerce platforms often perform better. Part of that comes down to trust. Consumers have become familiar with certain checkout experiences. They recognise them, they know what to expect and they feel comfortable completing a purchase. Many businesses invest heavily in creating a completely unique artistic online experience. Ironically, familiarity often matters more than originality by the time somebody reaches the checkout.

Your work is already expanding beyond Leuven. What would success look like if we had this conversation again in five years?

I’d like to see cities measuring their textile ecosystems almost automatically. The groundwork already exists. The dashboards are built. Now it’s about expanding the data. Eventually, I’d like to connect that with Digital Product Passports so that parts of the process become much more automated. At the same time, Europe is introducing Extended Producer Responsibility schemes. Those organisations will collect fees from companies placing textiles on the market and will need reliable information to understand what is actually happening to textiles throughout their lifecycle. We already have the framework live and tracking all the data during the duration of service for these EPR schemes.

Today, the focus is often on what happens once clothing has already become waste. To me, that’s far too late. Long before a garment ends up in a collection container, people can decide to wear it longer, repair it, restyle it or pass it on. Those earlier stages are where the biggest opportunities exist. That’s also where some of the most valuable data still needs to be collected.

We’re talking about data all the time. Are there already figures that illustrate that potential?

According to our own calculations, extending the average lifetime of garments by just three months could have a measurable impact on a city’s textile-related emissions.

At the same time, if consumers redirect even part of their spending away from ultra-fast fashion towards repairs, local designers or higher-quality products, that also strengthens local retail ecosystems. For me, that’s the real opportunity. Not simply understanding what happens once textiles become waste. But generating the data that helps prevent waste in the first place.