Saving Our Planet One Piece of Children’s Clothing at a Time

Writing by Cameron Bly

Photography by Shane Nelson

When Somers resident Rebecca Bahmani found out she was pregnant with her son during the first week of the COVID-19 lockdown, she panicked—but not for the reason most of us would. As an advocate for secondhand clothing, Bahmani’s mind went straight to dressing her son. 

‘“Oh my god,” she remembers thinking. “I have to take my daughter’s clothes and give them to my son. She needs to stop wearing dresses.”

Meanwhile, Bahmani’s job as a sales manager for a company that distributes lace was tumbling. 

“Nobody was buying lace really early on,” she explains. “I mean, nobody was getting dressed. Nobody knew what was going on in the world. I didn’t know if I needed to start looking for a job. So I started searching, and that’s what kind of led me to where I wanted to be and to how I knew I had a passion for the children’s clothing market.”

Stumbling into sustainable fashion

Bahmani, who says she didn’t even want to have children until she met her husband,  had never worked in children’s clothing. In fact, her path into the fashion industry looked quite different.

“I always enjoyed putting outfits together,” she says. “I definitely remember having a friend when I was 15 who was always impeccably dressed, and I think that’s when the lightbulb went off, and I thought, ‘This is amazing. This is where I want to be; this is what I want to do.’” 

Bahmani earned a degree in international trade and marketing from the Fashion Institute of Technology (FIT) and began the early part of her career working as a sales director for clothing wholesale showrooms. Eventually, she ended up in lace sales. 

Although the issue of sustainability was always in the back of her mind, it wasn’t her main focus. 

“I knew what I was doing as a career was not good for the environment, and it hurt me,” she explains. “I didn’t work for a company that was proactive. They were reactive, and I always wanted to be proactive.” 

She began learning more about the unsustainable practices in the fashion industry, including that 85 percent of donated clothing ends up being incinerated or sent to landfills.

“I just fell down this whole rabbit hole, you know,” Bahmani says. “And it’s so sad because I was part of this industry where there’s a mass production of clothing. And I’m not trying to take away from donation; I think it’s great, but these donation places don’t have the capacity to keep all the clothing because there’s such a mass production and overproduction of clothing that they don’t have the wherewithal to put it all.”

Bahmani ultimately decided she wanted to do something about this, and she began developing ideas for a new business that would promote sustainable practices in children’s fashion. 

Bahmani’s concept went through several iterations in her mind. At first, she had the idea of creating a children’s vintage clothing market. It then morphed into a buyback program where customers could sell their used clothing to Bahmani. She named it Prelove You.

“Really, what I was looking for was a formula for how to keep children’s clothing circular,” Bahmani explains, “because children go through seven sizes in the first two years of life alone.”

Finding the perfect formula

Prelove You is an online membership-based consignment shop of sorts that allows members to donate clothing their children have outgrown or no longer want for credits they can use to “purchase” other preloved clothing from the site. 

Credits are awarded based on the type, brand and condition of the items donated. Pieces that have been laundered or were produced sustainably are awarded additional credits. 

Bahmani accepts clothing ranging from newborn to size 12 and from all brands imaginable, ranging from fast-fashion brands like ZARA and Old Navy to luxury brands like Gucci and Fendi. 

“It’s really a give-and-get,” Bahmani explains. “In order to take out clothing, you need to put some in.”

Once clothing items become too worn down for use, Bahmani upcycles them. 

“I bring a lot of it to the Community Studio in Katonah,” she says. “There are women who are darning holes in clothing. I [also] work with a nonprofit that takes everything and grinds it up, then turns it into insulation, so it’s still sustainable.”

Once Bahmani secured the final piece in her sustainability puzzle, she was ready to launch Prelove You. 

“I do remember, very clearly, once I found the formula for Prelove You, saying, ‘Alright, I’m ready to pull the trigger. Let’s start building my website.’ And that was a really defining moment for me, making it real. It wasn’t just like I was ‘LLC-ing’ myself or anything like that. It was the defining moment when I figured it out, and I said, ‘Alright, let’s go.’” 

Technical difficulties

Bahmani began creating her website in November of 2022. Even though she hired a group of people to help her through the process, it still wasn’t easy. 

“It’s hard to get somebody into your head to try and understand what it is you’re doing,” she says. “I remember after the first two months, they showed me the website, and I was like, ‘But this is not what I want to do. You’re building a retail store. I’m not retail.’ So for me, that was a challenge.”

Bahmani faced additional customization challenges such as shipping and implementing her clothing credit system, which doesn’t have monetary value outside of Prelove You. 

“I couldn’t just jump onto Shopify and build a website,” she explains. “I wasn’t able to do that.”

But after a year and a half of hard work, Bahmani officially launched her website on May 6. Although she expected a slow start, she already has customers throughout the U.S., including California, Florida and New York, of course. 

So far, Bahmani is also doing most of the work herself.

“I take all the pictures myself and then I send them out to my assistant in Bangladesh, who edits them, and then I upload all of them myself and write all the descriptions,” she explains. “I do almost everything by myself—which, hopefully, I won’t have to one day, but I enjoy it. I find it a little cathartic.”

But she’s also trying to be cognizant about biting off more than she can chew. 

“I don’t mind it starting out slowly because it allows me to tweak certain things, get certain things down,” she says. “I’m still working on email flows and things like that. So, you know, I’m starting locally. That’s my goal.”

Dressing the future responsibly

So what does the future of Prelove You hold? Well, Bahmani doesn’t quite know. 

Through her platform, she hopes to educate people on the sheer wastefulness in the clothing industry and promote more sustainable lifestyle choices. 

“I don’t want to scare people,” she explains. “I feel like people feel shame if they’re not living a sustainable life. But I want to educate on smaller scales, like small, little things. For example, it takes 714 gallons of water to make one single white t-shirt, which equates to two and a half years of drinking water for one person.”

Bahmani also hopes to expand her business to spread the concept of Prelove You across the fashion industry. She’s already  exploring potential partnerships with several designer brands that she consults with regarding how to integrate sustainable practices into their lines. And she’s participating in various Climate Week activities, which begins on September 22. 

“In five or 10 years, I’m hoping that it’s pretty national,” she says. ”I hope that other companies adopt this business model not only for children’s clothing but that it becomes a business model and a shopping model that can help our planet.” 

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This article was published in the September/October 2024 edition of Connect to Northern Westchester.