Sustainable fashion brand Plooi welcomes its 100,000th customer this week and reports it has been profitable since the second quarter, two years after it was founded. Plooi makes clothing from recycled textile, manufactures exclusively in Portugal, and grew without any outside funding. The milestone coincides with the announcement of its first physical store.
Sustainable fashion is growing from a niche market into the mainstream, but consumers still find it hard to tell brands that genuinely invest in circularity apart from brands that merely dress themselves up in it. Figures from Statistics Netherlands (CBS) show that spending on sustainable consumer products has risen steadily in recent years, while trust in sustainability claims has lagged behind. Plooi is trying to earn that trust by manufacturing exclusively in Portugal, using traceable recycled textile, and is now showing for the first time that the model also works commercially. For brands in this market, profitability is therefore a rarer signal than revenue growth alone.
Since its founding, Plooi grew to 100,000 customers without any outside funding, and the company has been in the black since the second quarter. "We never did a funding round, so every customer has literally financed this company," says Femke Aalders, founder of Plooi. "That hundred-thousandth package is therefore just as important to us as profitability itself."
The operational side of that growth was no accident, says Plooi's COO: "Manufacturing in a single country keeps us in control of quality and lead time, even now that volumes have grown tenfold." The company will open its first physical store in Amsterdam this spring, the next step after two years of selling purely online. The store is meant mainly as a meeting place for customers who have so far only known the brand online.