We Won, and Here’s What That Really Means for Us, you and the future of sustainability
On 27th March,2026 Respun was recognised as a winner at the Outlook Planet C3 Summit & Awards, in the Empowering Upcycling & Recycling category. This means something which is far more bigger than an award for us, because when you are in the middle of building something, dealing with the logistics, the funding gaps, the days where nothing seems to move fast enough, you rarely stop to look at how far you have come. And this award made us pause and look back at the impact we created and how it actually changed lives the way we wanted it to environmentally and for the women in rural areas.
Respun did not start with a grand vision board or a perfectly pitched deck. It started with a problem that felt impossible to ignore. India generates 7 to 8 million tonnes of textile waste every year. Most of it ends up in landfills. And at the same time, there are women in underserved communities with real skills, in stitching, in fabric work, and no structured way to turn those skills into income. Two broken systems, sitting right next to each other.
So we asked a simple question. What if we connected them?
Today we stand at hundreds and thousands of connected people who donate clothes and our DMs flooded with them contributing to a change, saving water and redirecting waste someplace away from the landfills.
But the thing we are most proud of is not the numbers. It is the satisfaction in knowing that the work we do, is beyond finances and numbers, it’s measured in co2 and methane reduction, water wastage reduced, women empowered and young minds educated. It is the woman who told us this was the first time she felt like her skills belonged to her.
At the summit, our founder Archish Kansal spoke about what it really takes to build circular economy models that work, not just in theory, but on the ground. The answer is not complicated. You stop treating waste as an endpoint and start treating it as a starting point. You build systems instead of one-off initiatives. You bring people into the process, not just the product.
The green economy gets talked about a lot these days. But the real opportunity is not in the conversation rooms. It is in the fabric sitting in your wardrobe that you haven’t worn in two years. It is in the offcuts no one collected. It is in the communities that have been left out of the sustainability story for far too long.
That is where we work. And this recognition, from Outlook Business, at a stage that brings together some of the most serious sustainability work happening in India right now, means that the world is starting to see it too.
We are grateful. And we are just getting started.
Watch the full conversation with Archish at the link in our bio. And if you have fabric you no longer need, DM us on our instagram page, book a pickup on our website and let’s create change together!!
