Circular Thrift's mission is to make reuse practical by tackling the textile waste crisis on a hyperlocal level while cultivating a global community around sustainability.
Reduced consumption in our neighborhoods leads to collective impact at a global level and can change how fashion production impacts the environment. Lead this change in your community by hosting swap and mending events and by joining Circular Thrift Community Educational Events. We provide playbooks, advice, a platform to exchange ideas, and a centralized way to track the impact of each community’s efforts.
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Meet Lisa Goldsand,
Circular Thrift Founder and CEO
Lisa Goldsand has lived and worked in North America, Asia, and Central America. Lisa has gained valuable on-the-ground experience through her work on end-to-end product development and supply chain management of apparel and personal care products for multiple international companies. With her deep understanding of how the industry operates, Lisa is passionate about the urgent need for a shift toward a more circular model to reduce the fashion industry’s impact on climate change and natural resource consumption.
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The questions Lisa kept asking herself, as she pivoted from a global role in the world of fashion to a more localized one was, “What can one person do in this space to make a difference?”
In November of 2022 Lisa began her experiment with ways to scale the circular economy in her town of Bexley, Ohio. She started by collecting Halloween costumes, and then old backpacks and worn out sweaters, and then everything.
Throughout the following year, Lisa stored and circulating the Halloween costumes through sales and donations. She upcycled the backpacks and sweaters into hats. She started both an offline and an online local resale business. Lisa started hosting clothing swap events and became a regular provider of much-needed clothing to several local community organizations.
Lisa worked with professors from The Ohio State University and The University of North Texas to gather data about all of her activities during the first year of her clothing collection and recirculation efforts. She co-authored a paper estimating the potential impact of localized circularity efforts if they were repeated across the country in neighborhoods similar to hers, Bexley, Ohio.
Lisa’s interested in continuing to learn and assess the potential impact of hyperlocal community-led solutions to textile waste in small and large municipalities, schools and universities.
When she’s not thinking about the history of textiles or planning a community event, Lisa spends time with her husband, two kids and two dogs. She cooks a lot, and she considers listening to an audiobook the same thing as reading a physical copy of a book.
Fun fact: When Lisa was 11 she loved participating in breakdancing contests at parties. Her biggest win was at her friend’s Bat Mitzvah when she won the grand prize: Daryl Hall & John Oates’ Private Eyes.
Meet Laura Oldham,
Circular Thrift COO
Laura Oldham has been working in marketing since Facebook was created – literally. She’s helped clients around the world for more than two decades, which has given her fantastic insight into how businesses of all shapes and sizes succeed. In addition to her digital marketing background she is also a sustainability educator and plant propagandist. Laura loves all things related to climate-friendly living and is eager to implement creative ideas to shift consumption habits to tackle the constantly growing waste crisis.
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In third grade Laura won her school’s spelling bee and came home with the grand prize, 50 Simple Things Kids Can Do to Save the Earth. She devoured the hundreds of pages in an afternoon and quickly filled her house with nature-based and eco-friendly crafts, especially her favorite, homemade recycled paper. Laura was already fairly fixated on climate change (way back then it was referred to as global warming), and her new favorite paperback amped up that obsession. She’s been brainstorming about creative ways to live more mindfully as a good steward of the planet ever since.
In 2022 Laura’s passion for sustainability coupled with her climate anxiety sparked the creation of Return to Sender, a business focused on sustainability education through art and plant propaganda. While continuing to work in the digital marketing world in her first business, Starburst Media, Return to Sender gave Laura’s Midwestern work ethic permission to explore ways to create products in a more eco-friendly manner. Among other projects over the years, she set up a system in her garage to convert single-use plastic into 3D printer filament that she uses to print birdhouses, planters and more to keep small pieces of plastic out of waterways, animals, and our bodies.
Laura’s got a little bit of a experience in a whole lot of things. She’s been a writer, a history museum docent, a bartender, a sketch comedy performer, a floral designer, a retail associate, a journalist — and much more than can fit in this space. The common thread throughout the decades has been a deep curiosity to understand how the world works and what motivates people to make the decisions that they make. Laura’s background in improv comedy is the foundation of her “Yes, and…” philosophy that lands her in the middle of adventures of all shapes and sizes. In 2024 when Laura met Lisa, her gut immediately told her that Circular Thrift would be her next “Yes, and…” adventure.
Laura lives in Upper Arlington, Ohio with her husband Doug, daughter Violet, cat Rosie and the memories of her beloved beagle mix, Eleanor Roosevelt Oldham.