IO_Summer_21

Inside Outdoor | SUMMER 2021 18 Ingredients T he Renewal Workshop (TRW), a provider of white- labeled resale and renewal solutions that enable apparel and textile brands to com- pete in the second-hand market, recently announced a $6 million financing round. The round includes Rubio Ventures, Shift Invest, Closed Loop Partners, Grat- itude Railroad, Portland Seed Fund and Fashion for Good, among others. The news follows a recent expan- sion by the brand into Europe. In May, The North Face leveraged TRW’s technology, operations and fulfillment services to expand its U.S. recom- merce program into Germany. Fol- lowing that launch, Tommy Hilfiger’s Tommy for Life program expanded to France, employing TRW’s technology that offers a user-centric resale expe- rience in multiple languages, curren- cies and countries. Second-hand retail is considered one of the fastest growing segments of the fashion industry, and the pandemic only fueled it further. According to a 2021 consumer survey by Jungle Scout, near- ly 32 percent of respondents reported looking for pre-owned gear online, with 44 percent responding that they’ve pur- chased or sold used equipment online during the past 12 months. REI, for its part, recently reported its online used gear business is up nearly 100 percent compared to last year. Online resale platform ThredUp, meanwhile, recently estimated that the secondhand market would double in the next five years, reaching $77 billion. More than 33 million consumers pur- chased secondhand apparel for the first time in 2020, and 76 percent of those first-time buyers plan to increase their spend on secondhand apparel in the next five years, said ThredUp. “Given the fast-changing landscape of consumer sentiment, every brand needs to have a resale solution to stay competitive, and TRW is the ideal part- ner from both a technology and execu- tion perspective,” said Caroline Brown, current TRW board member and manag- ing director at Closed Loop Partners. B OA Technology has released a second report that the in- gredient brand said further validates improvements in athletic performance brought on by biomechanical changes directly related to BOA Fit System- equipped footwear. BOA worked with the University of Denver to measure the biomechanical impact of its fit solutions and their impact on performance. The study calculated variables through markers on the body paired to motion capture cameras, in combina- tion with force plates embedded in the floor. Thought a geometric model, re- searchers looked to estimate variables during athlete movements. “Using data from our study subjects, we measured three key variables: joint range of motion, joint moments and joint powers, one hundred times per second,” said Dan Feeney, Ph.D., BOA’s manager of biomechanics research and Performance Fit Lab. “In specific BOA configurations that we now call Perform- Fit Wrap, we saw that athletes could change direction more quickly during vertical and lateral drills.” Athletes also were able to optimize velocity and force in the direction they intended to move, Feeney continued, while minimiz- ing excessive motion in unintended directions, which can be associated with wasted energy and potentially injury risk. The research team re- ported that upper designs, specifically the tri-panel and y-wrap configura- tions, reduced motion in those undesired planes and increased range of motion and moments in the desired planes for each motion. Researchers also saw that these configurations produced greater rates of force development and resulted in less work for athletes. This second paper, which can be viewed at BOAFit.com , expands on the original study’s findings that the high per- forming BOA configurations resulted in a 3 percent to 9 percent improvement in agil- ity and speed and a reduction in energy required to perform a movement over the same shoe model with traditional laces. The BOA tri-panel configuration can be found in the new La Sportiva Cyk- lon trail running shoe and the existing Saucony Switchback 2. Apparel Resale Gets Funded BOA Says it Makes You Better Measuring performance at the BOA Performance Fit Lab