In the 39th episode of Ellie.Talks, we sat down with Achille Mathot, the founder of Trosort, a startup leveraging AI-powered tagging and automation to transform the textile industry. Our conversation explored how digitalization can enhance sustainability and transparency in the industry, making sorting and resale more efficient. Achille shared his journey, insights into the challenges of the industry, and his vision for the future of secondhand fashion and textile management.
Key insights:
- Smarter sorting increases textile value
AI-powered sorting, like Trosort’s technology, enables a faster and more accurate categorization and valuation of clothing, ensuring more items can be reused. - A connected supply chain prevents waste
AI helps link textile waste streams to the right partners, from resale platforms to recycling centers, preventing unnecessary downcycling or landfill disposal. - Data analytics as a driving force for circular fashion
AI and data analytics enable brands, retailers, and policymakers to proactively optimize textile flows and circular strategies. - Scale scale scale
From passion to innovation
Achille’s drive to create solutions that help people has been a constant throughout his life. With a background in mechanical engineering, he initially focused on energy transition but soon discovered the vast environmental impact of fashion. This realization led him to rethink his own consumption habits and experiment with a shared wardrobe concept. The challenges he encountered in digitalizing clothing items at scale sparked the idea for Trosort, a company dedicated to streamlining textile sorting through artificial intelligence.
“Once I understood the scale of the problem in textile waste, I couldn’t unsee it. It became clear that technology had to play a role in making secondhand fashion more efficient,” Achille explained.
Smarter sorting for greater value: digitalization and data are gold
One of the biggest challenges in the textile industry today is the efficient and scalable sorting of (post-consumer) textiles. Sorting centers are a crucial part of the textile waste management chain. Yet, many of these centers still rely on manual processes, leading to inefficiencies and lost opportunities for reuse. Digitalization presents a way to change that by making sorting more precise, scalable and data-driven.
Trosort’s technology leverages AI and computer vision to automate sorting and enhance the resale potential of secondhand clothing. By simply taking a picture of an item, detailed metadata – such as brand, condition, material composition and estimated market value – can be extracted, allowing for quick categorization and valuation. This data-driven approach ensures that sorting centers operate more efficiently.
“If we want to make circular fashion the norm, we need to solve the bottleneck of sorting first,” Achille explains. “AI allows us to process textiles at a speed and accuracy that were unthinkable before.”
Beyond efficiency, having accurate and consistent data is empowering : “Data isn’t just numbers; it’s the key to unlocking the full potential of secondhand fashion,” Achille states. “With better insights, we can make resale faster, more profitable, and more attractive to consumers.” As the secondhand market is experiencing exponential growth, with predictions suggesting it will double in size by 2028, it is important that it becomes more professionalized so that more people are encouraged to buy secondhand, reinforcing the shift towards circular fashion models.
Connecting textile waste streams with the right partners
Efficient sorting plays a crucial role in ensuring that textiles reach their highest-value end-of-life solution. While recycling remains a necessary component of textile circularity, it is crucial to maximize the potential for reuse before resorting to downcycling or waste-to-energy processes.
Trosort’s AI-driven tagging system also provides critical insights into material composition and recyclability. Sorting centers can then connect textiles with the most appropriate recycling facilities or resale platforms, ensuring that each item is directed towards the most sustainable outcome, keeping more garments in circulation rather than being discarded or downcycled prematurely.
“The true power of AI in fashion isn’t just automation; it’s creating a smarter system where nothing goes to waste,” Achille emphasizes. “By knowing exactly what we have, we can ensure it ends up where it belongs.”
A crucial aspect of digitalization in the textile sector is connecting the different links in the chain. In essence, Trosort aims to act as the digital bridge between sorting facilities, resale platforms, and recycling centers, optimizing textile flows and reducing the amount of clothing that ultimately ends up in landfills.
Trosort and E-Commerce: professionalizing and scaling up online secondhand resale
Beyond sorting, Trosort is also tackling the inefficiencies of secondhand clothing e-commerce, which is rapidly evolving. Selling pre-owned garments online is a booming business but today it is still a cumbersome process: many sellers still enter data manually, which is time-consuming and inefficient. Additionally, responding to customer inquiries, negotiating prices and managing inventory at scale can be overwhelming.
By integrating AI-drive solutions, Trosort’s aim is to enable sellers, big and small, to list more products in less time, ultimately improving the accessibility and attractiveness of secondhand clothing for a broader audience:
- Automating product listings: One of the biggest barriers to secondhand clothing sales is incomplete or low-quality product information. Trosort automates key listing elements by capturing garment dimensions, fabric details, and even optimizing descriptions for searchability.
- Enhancing images with automation: To make listings more attractive, Trosort offers automated background removal and image optimization, ensuring that secondhand items are presented professionally and appealingly.
- Dynamic pricing setting: Pricing secondhand fashion can be challenging due to fluctuating demand. Trosort’s AI-powered pricing tool analyzes market trends and competitor pricing to suggest optimal selling prices, maximizing both profitability and sales velocity.
- API integrations with major platforms: As resale platforms like eBay and Vinted invest in API-based integrations, Trosort ensures that resellers can seamlessly connect their inventories to multiple platforms, automating stock updates, pricing adjustments, and sales tracking.
The long-term goal is to streamline secondhand fashion on a large scale, making it as convenient and desirable as buying new clothes—but with a much lower environmental impact.
What about the future?
The traditional textile industry has been slow to adopt digitalization, but the tide is turning. Data is becoming a powerful tool for shaping policies, improving transparency, and unlocking new business models. Achille believes that AI-driven solutions will play a pivotal role in the industry’s transition, providing the necessary infrastructure to scale circularity effectively.
“I think the major shift comes from the power of analysis of the data that becomes very easily explainable for decision makers,” Achille explains. “With AI, it is possible to take pragmatic, data-driven decisions to improve textile flows, create better take-back programs, and optimize supply chains.”
Moreover, he envisions a future where AI can provide predictive insights, helping retailers, brands, and policymakers make proactive decisions about textile waste management. By leveraging AI-driven analytics, companies can anticipate shifts in consumer demand, optimize their supply chains, and introduce circular business models with greater efficiency. “The more data we gather, the better we understand the full lifecycle of textiles, from production to end-of-life solutions,” he adds.
Looking ahead, Trosort envisions scaling its solutions across Europe, integrating its AI-powered tools with key partners to enhance sorting centers, resale platforms and recycling networks. The ambition is clear: to connect the dots between digitalization and circularity, ensuring that secondhand textiles are not just managed more efficiently, but also valued as essential resources in a sustainable future.
“If there’s one thing I’ve learned, it’s that you have to start building—just take the first step,” Achille concludes. “Even if things change along the way, you’ll gain insights, adapt, and ultimately create something meaningful. That’s how you move forward.”
Conclusion
With AI and automation reshaping the landscape of textile reuse and resale, companies like Trosort are proving that technology can be a game-changer in making fashion circular. The challenge now is to scale these innovations and integrate them into the mainstream, making sustainable solutions the norm rather than the exception. By fostering collaboration across the industry, embracing digital transformation, and leveraging AI’s full potential, the textile sector can move closer to a truly circular future.
As digitalization continues to reshape the industry, solutions like Trosort will play a crucial role in making second-hand clothing more accessible, scalable, and profitable. The future of fashion is circular – and digital innovation is making it possible.
