Quid Project: Fragile women who recycle fabrics and create collections

It all starts with the classic five friends, schoolmates, at the bar. They wanted do something useful for their community starting from the fight against waste and helping the most vulnerable people, and they found themselves building a social enterprise model, his name is Quid, with very interesting prospects. We are in 2012, in the Avesa district of Verona, and the five boys, without a single euro in their pockets, manage to obtain a loan of 15 thousand euros from the San Zeno FoundationLeading the group is a girl from Bocconi, Anna Fiscal, who is now 36 years old and has decided to dedicate all his efforts to the Quid project.

What is the Quid project?

At the beginning, Quid's activity was more commercial than productive. The classic clothing recovery, even famous brands, which are then sold to support needy families. But in a few years the project takes off and transforms radically, with the fight against a double wasteOf people and things. The people, that is, the employees of the social cooperative, are today about a hundred women who share a painful, problematic, if not tragic past. There is who has struggled to get over drugs and alcoholThose who fled the war that broke out in their home country. Those who were in prison. And those who suffer from a physical or mental disability. A fragility that does not represent a limitation at all, but rather a starting point for redesigning a more inclusive world, focusing on an Italian excellence, fashion. Quid's goal, in fact, is to offer a sustainable and accessible design product, also and above all thanks to the low cost of raw materials, namely production surpluses, or "Fabrics abandoned by haute couture, recovered at a national levelThe production of accessories and clothing from surplus materials has become Quid's core business, and the company has also extended its ethical fashion into collaborations with other Italian companies, such as the Calzedonia group, for which it curated an "ethical" line as part of the Quid For Project, which designs sustainable fashion for other Italian textile companies.

Ethical and sustainable choices

The Quid Project creates its own creations starting from from production surpluses, with sizes too small for large-scale production or discontinued due to issues related to trends or fabric characteristics. Quid's supplier network, to create its collections, includes around fifty fashion, luxury and textile companies. And so far the project has allowed us to recover over 1.500 kilometers of fabricFrom the basement of a school, Quid has moved to two warehouses where the remains of clothes, fabrics and furniture arrive and are processed: they are leftovers or remainders of the production of over thirty of the most famous Made in Italy brands. Once they arrive in the warehouses, the fabrics left in the warehouse and destined to go to waste are reused by Quid workers and completely transformed. A sofa cover turns into a collection of bags. Plastic becomes shopping bags. A scrap of fabric becomes an evening dress. And since the start of the pandemic, Quid has been producing, at a breakneck pace, high-quality, affordable masks. In short, the five young people from Verona have succeeded in creating a perfect circular economy model. This innovative approach earned Quid first prize at theEuropean Social Innovation Competition 2014 and, in 2017, the awards Momentum For Change of the United Nations and the Civil Society Prize of European Commission Employment and Social Affairs. Items from the Quid collections are sold in two physical stores (in Vallese, in the province of Verona, and in Cadriano dell'Emilia, in the province of Bologna), on the website and in around a hundred points of sale with its brand and in a hundred multi-brand stores, throughout Italy, offering articles from the Verona-based social enterprise. Its turnover exceeds €3,5 million. And to think it all started with five friends at the bar, without a cent in their pockets.

Photo source: Quid project

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• NOI Technology Park, a modern research and development incubator for green companies.
• Sustainable extinguishing, so cigarette butts become clean energy. Biogas and biomethane.
• School gardens: the project to conduct the first census in Italy.

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