Strategy models for upcycling. How to create a systemic change through practice potentialities.

Upcycling has accelerated considerably during the pandemic, where excess inventories for the spring/summer 2020 collection exceeded 140 billion and are increasingly being explored worldwide (Chan, 2020). The practice involves recycling waste materials of various kinds, intending to make products that are not only sustainable but that, through an appropriate design process, acquire added value compared to the source materials. Applying a specific forma mentis - systemic design - the contribution explores new realities explicitly shaped to be part of the re-fashion sector, established companies that have started in their attempts to reconvert even a part of their system, and aims to define a framework starting from waste to levels of integration of the latter in parallel supply chains. In this case, the Systemic Innovation Design approach represents a methodological approach (Barbero & Tamborrini, 2015) and a sustainable design practice to apply knowledge to systemic problems with the aims of co-designing products, systems and business models for sustainable services (Jones, 2014). Cases of this kind were collected and analyzed to capture and return the salient aspects of each upcycling process. A tripartite form was drawn up with three criteria: sustainability, communication and the intrinsic emotions that the brand wants to convey to the consumer in its upcycling model. The research shows that although upcycling does not yet have a precise connotation (Cassidy & Han, 2015), it is a widespread phenomenon continuously being experimented with by both individual consumers and brands. The contribution attempts to offer a critical overview of some of the realities currently on the market and to highlight how, from the same practice, completely different business models can emerge.