Threads of Change: Inside Rifò’s Circular Fashion Model
What if the clothes we no longer use could become the starting point for something new? This is the question at the heart of Rifò, an Italian brand turning textile waste into high-quality garments. Founded in Prato, an Italian town with a centuries-old recycling tradition, Rifò has built a circular business model that reimagines fashion from the ground up.
From Viet Nam to Prato
Italian entrepreneur Niccolò Cipriani never planned to work in fashion. His path to founding Rifò began far from home, in Southeast Asia.
“I was working for a UN program in Viet Nam as a program coordinator. While I was there, I realized there was a problem in the fashion industry: overproduction. We produce large quantities of products and sell maybe 70% of them on average, and the rest normally ends up in a landfill or is incinerated.”
Viet Nam is among the world’s top three textile and garment exporters, with exports estimated at USD 46 billion in 2025, according to the Viet Nam Textile and Apparel Association. Producing at this scale also means managing what goes unsold: according to the UN Environment Programme (UNEP), around 92 million tonnes of textile waste are generated worldwide each year.
Niccolò’s experience in Viet Nam stayed with him after he returned home to Prato in northern Tuscany. That year, his desire for a more sustainable system crystallized into a business idea. Not long after, a crowdfunding campaign brought Rifò to life.
A newcomer to fashion, Niccolò turned to the place he knew best: Prato, where artisans known as cenciaioli have been sorting textile scraps for recycling for more than a century. “In the beginning it was a challenge to understand and learn more about the industry. What helped me is that I come from Prato, so it was easy for me to get in touch with people with really strong technical skills.”
In the following years, the brand continued to grow with the opening of its first headquarters in Prato. Starting from a cashmere accessories collection, Niccolò’s team began experimenting with denim and wool. Today, the company works with a wide range of recycled materials, including linen, silk, and cotton.
Circularity by Design
For Rifò’s founder, sustainability has less to do with isolated pieces and collections and more with reimagining the system as a whole. Innovation in fashion, he argues, demands a hard look at the industry’s very foundations: “The most sustainable thing to do in this industry would be to stop producing. So you really have to offer an alternative to something that is used and consumed in the wrong way.”
Consistent with this premise, the Italian brand defines itself as a circular economy system. Under this business model, customers can send in unused items in exchange for discounts, pre-orders ensure that production matches demand, and second-hand purchases can be made directly from the website, through a dedicated marketplace with its own brand identity, Re-Rifò.
Spinning a Social Fabric
In 2022, Rifò joined forces with the Fondazione Opera Santa Rita, a reception center in Tuscany offering people in vulnerable situations paid professional training. The initiative also addresses a pressing challenge for Tuscany’s textile sector: the generational renewal of a workforce whose traditional know-how risks being lost.
“We decided to build a bridge project with the municipality and other associations,” says Niccolò. “We teach them the job and then they do one month of training, six months of paid internship, and then they can decide whether or not to stay with the company.”
Each edition, participants follow theoretical training, Italian language courses, and specific training in the different work areas: spinner, weaver, or cenciaiolo. Since the beginning of the project, the brand has managed to activate 17 employment contracts.
Growing with Confidence
Despite being a young brand, today Rifò’s products are available online and in around 160 stores across Italy and 140 abroad. And where growth carries risk, intellectual property offers a measure of confidence. “It makes you more confident, and you feel that every step you make is safer,” reflects Niccolò in a conversation about the use of trademarks.
Beyond registering the Rifò trademark across all European Union countries and the United States, among others, the brand holds several other registered trademarks. These include Fluffypack, an innovative sustainable packaging solution made entirely from textile leftovers transformed into a felt bag, which is featured in the WIPO GREEN database.
Fluffypack gives a second life to textile scraps that cannot be turned into new garments, and because it is produced through a mechanical process, it uses less water, energy and chemicals than conventional packaging. It may seem like a small detail, but it captures the idea that set Niccolò on this path back in Viet Nam: nothing should go to waste. From the yarn to the bag a garment is delivered in, Rifò has turned that conviction into a brand, and intellectual property is helping it protect and promote every piece of it.
