About Eleven Radius
The Why.
Dynamic fashion brands like yours, and the entrepreneurs who serve you, are building circularity into your core business models—but haven’t had a collective voice, a resource center, a gathering place. Entrenched brands with deep pockets have a lot of places to go—but innovative brands are too busy growing their businesses and building a new circular economy to worry about what far-flung goals they should contemplate. Fashion is competitive and the world is burning. We don’t have time to wait. We believe that you will disrupt the linear models out there and prove that the future of the economy is circular, and we’re committed to help build that world with you.
The Problem.
The ecosystem for the circular fashion economy today is fragmented, sparse, and unscalable. Despite growing interest in circular business models, the majority of the efforts, collaborations, resources, and forums exist to help large companies transition their linear models. Support is lacking for small- and medium-sized businesses embedding circular models at early stages to collaborate and share “bottom-up” learnings from their efforts. We work to facilitate effective collaboration between like-minded brands and service partners trying to solve the same circularity problems. We exist to prove out profitable, replicable circular operations with business discipline to help these companies scale.
Our Theory of Change
We will help build and enrich the circular fashion ecosystem in two broad ways:
By helping values-aligned fashion brands understand, evaluate, and gain exposure to circular methods and implement them in the context of growing their business.
By helping companies offering circularity services connect with ideal customers in a collegial environment, in which they can understand their customers’ challenges, improve their offerings, pilot programs, and ultimately grow and scale these nodes in the circular ecosystem.
Our Values.
We believe that the circular economy, by virtue of being tightly linked in a “value web” rather than a traditional value chain, requires a constant bidirectional flow of information along with products and materials. Such active, transparent, and data-rich communication requires a foundation of trust and common values. We are therefore founded on trustworthiness and transparency. We favor symbiotic and co-creative collaboration over zero-sum competition. We value thoughtful experimentation and action over theory and perfection. We believe in the power of collective action and aggregate power, leveraged through our servant leadership.
Our Business Model.
We are founded as a for-profit, benefit corporation. All business entities, whether for-profit or non-profit (or other hybrid models), are beholden to their funders. By existing as a membership dues-driven company, we are beholden to our members. As an entity dedicated to growing along with the circular fashion economy, we share in the profit-seeking discipline and business rigor that our customers must maintain, while balancing our obligations to the public good, as per the definition of a Delaware Public Benefit Corporation. We hope to grow and scale as we grow and scale the circular fashion economy.
Why Eleven?
Eleven is odd, prime, unique. It’s large and it’s small. Eleven is one and one; in binary, the language of technology, one and one makes three.
Eleven is also the number of brave circular fashion companies that took a chance on us in our first Sprint. It’s part of our origin story. We always want to remember where we started, and whom we first launched to serve.
Why Radius?
The radius is the straightest line that radiates from the center of the circle. We are that line connecting circular companies, methods, and values from the heart of the circle to its edge.
We don’t judge your progress on circularity; we’re here as the bridge from wherever you are to where you want to be.