About Care to ReWear
How We Started
Care to Rewear began humbly, inside EMRC, where our founder was working as a Circular Economy Officer, running community clothes swaps. Swap after swap, the racks filled and emptied , clothes finding new homes, old habits slowly shifting.
Then came a small but pivotal idea: what if a swap wasn't just about finding something new to wear, but about learning to hold onto what you already had? So, the team paired the swaps with something they'd never tried before ,a repair workshop, right there alongside the clothes rail. People didn't just leave with someone else's garment; they left knowing how to mend their own. That simple shift became the seed of everything: Care to Rewear , repair and cherish what you have, but also something bigger ,embrace reuse as an act of hope and quiet rebellion. When the in-house program eventually came to an end, the idea didn't end with it. Care to Rewear stepped out on its own, an independent organisation now, still carrying that same spirit forward.
What we’ve achieved…so far
Since going independent, Care to Rewear has turned textile waste education into something practical, visible and community based.
In the 2025–2026 financial year alone, we ran 27 clothes swaps (including our Yagan Square series, delivered in partnership with Refashion), diverting 1.1 tonnes of clothing from landfill and avoiding 8,948 kg of CO₂-e emissions , the equivalent of taking almost two cars off the road for a year. Our pedal-powered Mending Machine clocked 400 km across 17 activations, repairing 42 kg of clothing and sparking 1,000 conversations about repair and reuse. We took textile literacy into classrooms through 7 school incursions reaching 500 students, ran 5 Dressed to Excess workshops, and helped make 200 tawashi sponges out of old socks. Alongside all this, we co-organised the Great Global Mend , a coordinated repair event across 15 Perth councils, 16 events and 300 attendees. These numbers matter because they represent something bigger than data: people choosing to swap instead of buy new, repair instead of discard, and take part in doing better, together.
Meet Stephanie, Founder and CEO
About Steph
I'm Stephanie , Steph to most people. I grew up in the South of France, moved to Melbourne in 2009, and landed in Perth in 2021 with my husband and our two boys, Andrea and Valentino. I speak French, English and Italian, though these days I mostly use them to argue with my kids in three languages instead of one.
Before Care to Rewear, I worked in law, then water management, then as a Circular Economy Officer , a strange-sounding job that mostly meant convincing people that the bin isn't the end of the story for their clothes. It turns out that's the thread that ties everything together: I've always cared less about the theory of sustainability and more about the moment someone actually changes what they do with their hands.
That instinct is rooted in memory. My grandmother's hands, and the quiet care she put into making and repairing, taught me that every garment holds a story worth extending. That spirit lives at the heart of everything I do.
Nature is my other great love. I've walked the Great Ocean Walk and the Cape to Cape Track, and there's a way that time on foot teaches you what actually matters. To me, keeping a garment in use instead of sending it to landfill is the same idea, just closer to home.
Care to Rewear: repair and cherish what you have, because the most sustainable wardrobe is the one you already own.