Care & Repair

Care & Repair focuses on maintenance and repair. We develop solutions that go beyond repair itself and create space for four circular interventions: repair, refurbish, redesign, and rethink. Our goal? To design repairable clothing and systems that make repair truly accessible for users, designers, tailors, and brands.

We bring the entire chain together: users, designers, tailors, and brands. Together, they develop strategies and practical tools to keep clothing in circulation longer. This includes designing garments that are easier to repair, new business models for brands, and ways to make taking care of clothes a natural part of everyday behavior.

We follow the Double Diamond model: explore, define, develop, deliver, and work through co-creation with all parties in the clothing chain. We combine participatory design, behavioral research, iterative practical testing, and ecosystemic learning (social learning).

In addition, we explore how maintenance (care) and repair (repair) can become a natural part of fashion practice. Questions addressed include:

• Why do people choose to keep or repair their clothes, or not?
• How can designers cleverly integrate repair and maintenance into their designs?
• What role can brands play in motivating customers to wear their clothes longer?
• How can we bring users, tailors, designers, and brands together in a single ecosystem?

With Care & Repair, we aim to gain insights into effective strategies that encourage users to actively maintain and repair their clothing. At the same time, this research seeks to provide a clear picture of the role of makers and designers within broader, sustainable repair networks.

The ultimate goal: to structurally embed care and repair into the fashion system, making the care for clothing a normal and valuable part of fashion practice.

Within Care & Repair, we develop white-label concepts that designers, brands and tailors can directly implement. We also provide guidelines and training programmes to integrate maintenance into design and repair processes. For consumers, we launch campaigns using proven behavioural interventions that encourage care and repair practices. For brands, we develop a business case guide offering insights into customer retention, loyalty and sustainability. In addition, we publish a toolkit on design orchestration as a driver for systemic change and share scientific insights into the conscious and unconscious motivations behind repair behaviour.

Through these outcomes, Care & Repair contributes to:

• reducing textile waste by preventing premature replacement;
• normalising care and repair as part of clothing use; x
• creating new economic opportunities for designers, tailors and brands within a circular economy.

In parallel, Jakomijn van Wijk (Amsterdam School of International Business) is conducting research into how co-creation in networks works: how do you successfully bring together parties with different motives, for instance financial and idealistic? This knowledge contributes to organizing sustainable collaboration within the textile sector.

Care & Repair is part of the broader NewTexEco research community at ArtEZ University of the Arts. Within this community, ArtEZ collaborates with the Amsterdam University of Applied Sciences, Saxion University of Applied Sciences, and around thirty partners on the transition toward a circular textile chain, with design as the driving force.

This project is part of the Design Power & Transitions programme, which is funded through the PPS-i scheme of the Dutch Ministry of Economic Affairs and Climate Policy, administered by TKI CLICKNL.

Photo: BvOF, 2025