For Marcus Crook, the co-founder and creative director of Melbourne-based social enterprise HoMie, collaborating with an industry heavyweight like Country Road is “a bit of a pinch-myself moment”.“Their shared commitment to responsibility and circularity has been really exciting for us, and especially as a small brand, being platformed by someone like Country Road is huge exposure for our impact programs and what we’re doing with Reborn as well,” Crook told Inside Retail.Founded in 2015, HoMie uses the profits from sales of its streetwear products to fund programs that support young people affected by homelessness. A few years ago, it launched Reborn, which upcycles excess stock to tackle fashion’s waste issue. Now, the brand has teamed up with Country Road to reimagine 230 units of deadstock Country Road sweaters as limited-edition collector’s items.The Country Road X HoMie collection will be available at the retailer’s Brighton, Chadstone, South Yarra and Warringah Mall stores while stocks last.While small in size, this pilot collection, much like its tagline, “from the Country Road to the city streets”, represents a big possibility for socially and environmentally responsible fashion.From deadstock to out-of-stockCrook wants to inspire other Australian retailers to see excess stock not as a loss but instead as an opportunity – proving that sustainability is not just a nice-to-have but a commercial viability.“We’ve shown that instead of putting things on sale, for example, we’ve been able to give those products a little bit of love and put them back on the shop floor at higher than the original retail value, ” explained Crook.HoMie’s Reborn program began by recreating past season HoMie garments to give them a second chance at selling. But after repurposing over 4000 garments in its own warehouse with just two sewing machines, the brand started to think bigger.Now, Homie has its sights set on scaling the Reborn program by taking brands’ immovable stock and remaking them into in-demand garments, thanks to a new partnership with local manufacturer ABMT, located in the northern Melbourne suburb of Sunshine. “What’s really exciting is that we’ve been able to scale it up because that’s a problem with circular fashion. It’s just hard to do at a commercially scalable venture,” said Crook.“Partnering with ABMT now, instead of doing 50 garments a week, we can do 1500, so that’s really opened the doors to these bigger brands, like the Country Roads,” he added.For Crook, the opportunity to spotlight local manufacturing and warehousing is just as exciting as creating a new collection. HoMie wants to boost the local economy and create job opportunities with its social enterprise business model.“As we know, local manufacturing has really died off in the past 20 to 30 years here in Australia,” stated Crook.“I feel like there’s a real opportunity in the remake space because brands can’t exactly ship their product offshore to the factories they came from but what we’re doing here is providing that circular solution,” he elaborated.HoMie is eager to explore reuse in the fashion industry by reworking existing garments into limited-edition pieces through local manufacturing that supports the economy – starting with Country Road.“We’re going from ‘the Country Road to the city streets,’ and we’re bringing this partnership to a new realm,” concluded Crook.“We can’t do it by ourselves so we need these big brands to help us along the journey and tackle these social issues.”