Echoing strategy in Hyping Nature-Connected Lifestyles in Eco Comms: Summer 2025 corralling (often unorthodox) aspirational, youth-galvanising creative perspectives on nature is critical to catalysing change. This season saw film, music, mall concepts, brand-backed maker workshops and superlative social media comms positioning nature as a high-desire pop-culturally vital proposition.

Product restoration is an increasingly important business, particularly when aligned with recommerce (resale platforms with built-in repair services now generate 25% more repeat purchases than those without – Save Your Wardrobe, 2025). Enter new sentimental and/or theatricalised brand concepts adding cachet to repair and crafting an elevated narrative where reparation prowess has a similar halo to artisanal expertise.  

Other brands are powering up with pragmatic repair pathways – from opening academies teaching restoration skills (increasingly important in meeting repair legislation) to embracing advancing technology, including agentic AI, to deliver more efficient services for both retailers and consumers.

Channelling the still swelling appetite for preloved fashion (48% of US Gen Z and millennials say second-hand is now their first port of call when shopping – Thred Up x GlobalData, 2025) comes new apparel recommerce concepts, plus advertising shifting the sector’s transition further into the mainstream gaze. 

The European deadline for Digital Product Passports (DPPs – IDs accessed by tech like QR and barcodes) providing transparency and traceability is looming; commencing in 2026. By 2033, all textiles-based product will require full lifestyle data. But alongside the pressure come exciting brand opportunities. These tools can be a direct line to provenance, contextual style/pop-cultural content and storytelling, recommerce and repairs, fan communities, and more.

Gaming, including esports, is a serious sweet spot for incubating environmentally positive behaviours: 79% of gamers who play games with green messages or environmental content report making at least one positive behavioural change post-play (UNDP, 2025). Enter new games which, echoing section one, place an inspiring lens on nature.

New or revamped rental concepts continue to present a key opportunity for brands to raise their circularity game, particularly in sectors including luggage and childrenswear (the latter a $1.3bn market expected to grow at a CAGR of 12.5% to 2033 – AMR, 2025).

Easy-to-do waste reduction initiatives that offer consumers – and often retailers/brands – significant cost and/or time efficiencies have huge mileage. Aside from their practical financial benefits, they also assuage feelings of sustainability-related shame: the average American experiences 48 days of ‘eco guilt’ – the feeling that they could be doing more to help the environment (NY Post, 2025).

Echoing concepts detailed in Retail & Brand Comms: Solutions for the New Climate Era comes the need for brands to sell innovative eco-product solutions via imaginative spaces, permanent or pop-up – dispelling any sense of planet-positive products as inferior or less desirable and acknowledging the shift into an irrevocably changed world (see Nike below).