Sustainability & Wine Tasting Evening with Charlotte Morley, founder, The Little Loop
Retail Insider held its latest event with the theme of sustainability involving guest speaker Charlotte Morley, founder & CEO of The Little Loop, at Hedonism Wines in London’s Mayfair followed by a lesson in chocolate tasting and tutored tasting of sustainable wines.
The event sponsored by K3 involved senior executives from Charlotte Tilbury, Heal’s, John Lewis, Loro Piana and The Edit LDN hearing the story of how Charlotte created rental marketplace, The Little Loop, to address the dual issues of her seeking more value when buying children’s clothes and the pursuit of living more sustainably.
Since founding the company in 2019 and successfully raising money on Dragon’s Den she has been addressing the challenges of attracting customers to a new way of buying and also convincing clothing brands to get involved. The brands involved include John Lewis.
Charlotte highlighted how she has proven the rental model can generate greater returns – 20-30% more – for brands than a single sale. The upside for brand owners getting involved with The Little Loop rather than seeking to create their own marketplaces is the richness of data the company generates, which can optimise the rental process and deliver more environmental impact. She revealed there is current investigation around providing the technology as a white label for brand owners to host on their websites.
As well as enjoying growth at The Little Loop Charlotte is also proud of the contribution the company is making to the broader drive towards a circular economy within the clothing sector. She told guests at the event that six months ago the majority of online searches within this area were specifically for The Little Loop but that this has flipped and now the majority are for children’s rental clothing.
Much has been achieved at the company to date and to further push the organisation along Charlotte says that sourcing funding from angel investors is part of the plan.
The evening included a lesson in chocolate tasting from Spencer Hyman, co-founder of Cocoa Runners, which only deals with small producers of sustainable chocolate and runs tasting events as well as offering chocolate box subscriptions.
The event concluded with a tutored wine tasting hosted by one of the expert Hedonism sommeliers involving a number of flights of wines specially selected because of their adherence to sustainability and environmentally-friendly production methods.
Retail Insider would like to thank Charlotte Morley and Spencer Hyman for taking part in the event and providing some great insights on the night and also to K3 for making the event possible.
Glynn Davis, editor, Retail Insider
