Nate Spiteri’s Shopfront website to buy and resell clothes has on Thursday morning won eBay’s 2025 Circular Fashion Fund. That’s a prize of $100,000 that the site can now use to enhance the secondhand clothing market.
The site allows consumers and sellers to upload photos of clothes to the site, which then uses AI to generate a shopfront and list on several marketplaces.
According to Spiteri, almost 60 million people sell fashion globally, 40 per cent of whom give up because selling clothes is difficult. His business aimed to combat this issue and make it easier for ordinary consumers to resell their clothes.
Shopfront, along with the mentorship and support of eBay, will continue to represent its mission at a global competition between the winners from the UK, the US and Germany.
Two other brands, Owen Parry’s Hello Tailr and Dave Giles-Kaye and Kirri-Mae Sampson’s HATCH + make, won $50,000 each for making it to the final round and will be supported for the next 12 months by eBay and the Australian Fashion Council (AFC).
Over 100 applicants entered the competition, which was narrowed down to eight brands judged on three areas of criteria. Of those eight, the three above were chosen as finalists because of their brands’ innovation, circularity and business viability and scalability.
eBay, which claims it is “the OG [original gangster] of pre-loved fashion” is at the forefront of sustainable circular fashion through its basic model as a buying and reselling platform, through the Circular Fashion Fund and through partnerships and connections at the consumer and business level.
The Australian fashion and textile industry is worth $28 billion annually to the Australian economy and Australia is among the top three worst countries for textile waste following China and the United States, according to the platform’s fashion category manager, Natalie Lai.
The amount of waste is why many Australians, along with the platform, are trying to change the unsustainable model of the fashion industry through a transition to pre-loved fashion, Lai said.
The company’s Australian fashion lead Anne-Marie Cheney said the platform has seen strong growth in people coming to buy pre-loved fashion, whether that is for economic or sustainability reasons.
The transition to circular fashion requires “systemic change and incubation of the most exciting ideas,” chief executive of the Australian Fashion Council, Jaana Quaintance-James, said.
Businesses such as eBay and initiatives such as the Circular Fashion Fund are “critical to this transition,” she said.
The Circular Fashion Fund is one way the platform promotes and supports emerging brands in the circular fashion economy. Along with the platform’s focus on promoting brands, it is working to excite and encourage customers to participate in pre-loved shopping. Cheney said her company engages consumers in circular fashion in a couple of ways – through technology, partnerships, and influencers.
On the technology side, it tries to make it “really easy for people to find the brands that they love and be able to search brands that fit them and give them some really great inspiration,” said Cheney.
According to Cheney, her company is a long-term partner with Australian Fashion Week and works with influencers to try to change the consumer perception that preloved fashion is not as good as buying brand new.
As part of this, it partners with The Vault, a peer-to-peer rental business, which offers customers more options and educates them on ways to shop and sell more sustainably.
“I’d love to be able to see one day innovation coming from all over the world, and there’s people coming together and helping each other grow and scale their businesses,” she said.
“It’s going to take a whole systems approach to challenge and change how we do fashion in Australia,” said Cheney.
For this “OG of pre-loved fashion,” transitioning the fashion industry starts at the business and consumer level.
