About ReFAB
ReFAB is proud to be part of The Kartik Foundation, a charity devoted to supporting disadvantaged youths and communities.
ReFAB creates beautiful, bespoke lifestyle products that you will cherish for years to come. We transform luxury fabrics destined for landfill into pieces you can feel great about buying. Each piece not only reduces fabric waste but also provides job opportunities to the local female artisans who lovingly hand-craft all of our products.
Our pieces are designed to spark joy in your everyday life, whether that’s with a one-of-a-kind treasure that instantly makes your house feel like a home or a stylish accessory that helps you fall in love with a well-worn outfit all over again.
ReFAB is for you – the conscious consumer who cares about the planet and wants to leave the Earth in a slightly better state than you found it.
We’re all about putting the planet before profit. In fact, it’s woven into everything we do. By partnering with textile companies and organisations that work to empower disadvantaged female communities, we are stitching together a beautiful way to find meaning and delight in the age of waste. Want to find out how?
Our Values
ReFAB is proud to be part of the Kartik Prabhu Foundation, a charity devoted to supporting disadvantaged youths and communities. From day one, we’ve lived and breathed our values. They’re what make us who we are and will carry us to where we’re going. From our zero-waste approach to our ethical partners, we’re devoted to our mission of creating hugely positive social, economic, and environmental impact in any way we can.
We’re big believers in collaboration over competition too. Because alone you go fast, but together we go far. Without our incredible partners who help us upskill women from disadvantaged communities, and the designer brands who generously donate their exquisite fabrics, we wouldn’t be where we are today.
As a social enterprise, we reinvest all profits back into achieving our mission. Every sale helps us to save more fabric from landfill, upskill and create livelihoods for more women from challenging backgrounds, and reduce carbon emissions and water usage. While we’re doing our bit to help solve the world’s sustainability challenges, our spirit is optimistic. We love what we do and we have fun while we’re doing it!
Meet the Team
We’re a group of joyful, talented, and ambitious dreamers who are motivated by the purposeful work that we do. We might be small, but we’re a team of passionate go-getters determined to make a positive mark on the planet and the people we work with.
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Cordelia Blair-Stickland
Design and Production
As a multidisciplinary designer specialising in textiles, Cordelia creates our unique designs and works closely with our community tailors to realise them.
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Tutku Kantoglu
Digital Marketing
As a consultant specialising in social media and digital marketing, Tutku creates eye-catching content for ReFAB’s social media and works closely with our website developers to optimise and drive more traffic.
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Rewati
Founder and Creative Director
An architect-urban designer and social entrepreneur with over 25 years of expertise around the world,
Rewati breathes sustainability into all her projects big and small.
From Our Founder’s Heart
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It all began with a call. One that my dear friend – who worked at a luxury design studio – made to tell me that some of her gorgeous, unused fabric samples were about to be put in the bin. I couldn’t bear the thought, so I grabbed a suitcase and went to her, stuffing as much fabric as possible into it.
It was the end of 2019 and I had a trip to India planned to visit my mum. I took my suitcase full of fabric with me because I had connections with a few women’s charities out there and knew we could turn them into something cool.
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It all began with a call. One that my dear friend – who worked at a luxury design studio – made to tell me that some of her gorgeous, unused fabric samples were about to be put in the bin. I couldn’t bear the thought, so I grabbed a suitcase and went to her, stuffing as much fabric as possible into it.
It was the end of 2019 and I had a trip to India planned to visit my mum. I took my suitcase full of fabric with me because I had connections with a few women’s charities out there and knew we could turn them into something cool.
COVID ensured that I stayed in India for a lot longer than I’d originally planned. I spent a lot of my time working with the charities, developing ways to upcycle these
beautiful fabrics. After much trial and error and many laughs (and a few tears!), we made some lovely products. When I finally returned to London, I shared the products we’d created with my family and friends; they were an instant hit!
This lit a spark within me, and I began to explore the challenge of textile waste in the UK and realised just how enormous it was. I discovered that textile merchants wanted to dispose of their unwanted fabrics sustainably but often didn’t have the right partners. A lot of upholstery fabrics were instead sent to schools, which, while it did give them a new lease of life, was still a relatively short one. This really bothered me – these gorgeous fabrics had at least 20 years of life in them!
Around the same time, I happened to be working on projects within the government’s Levelling Up programme, which seeks to catalyse growth in underdeveloped parts of the UK. I began to appreciate the role of upskilling in creating opportunities for deprived communities within the UK. I was exposed to the challenge of upskilling and its ability to transform the lives of women from disadvantaged backgrounds.
That’s when the lightbulb moment came – we could combine upcycling with upskilling. I’d be able to save fabrics from their landfill destinies, all the while harnessing underutilised skills and creating beautiful products that could be cherished for years and years to come.
And so here we are, 2 years later – a small start-up with huge ambitions. We strive every day to live by the sentence we wrote down at the very beginning: To find meaning and delight in the age of waste. We have a long way to go, but we’re on the right track. And we’re so delighted to have you on this journey with us, too.
Rewati,
Founder of ReFAB
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Upcycled Fabrics
Learn how we rescue deadstock designer fabrics destined for landfill and turn them into unique high-quality products with a positive environmental impact.
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Upcycled Fabrics
Learn how we rescue deadstock designer fabrics destined for landfill and turn them into unique high-quality products with a positive environmental impact.
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