The Man Who Came to Take Your Old Clothes — And Changed Everything
Every morning, across every Indian city, a man with a cart and a bell walks your street. He has been doing it for decades. You know the sound. You might have handed him a newspaper, an old bottle, a broken fan. You have never handed him your clothes. Not because you didn’t want to. But…
Every morning, across every Indian city, a man with a cart and a bell walks your street. He has been doing it for decades. You know the sound. You might have handed him a newspaper, an old bottle, a broken fan.
You have never handed him your clothes.
Not because you didn’t want to. But because nobody ever built a system that made it possible.
That gap — invisible, enormous, sitting at the intersection of 7.8 million tonnes of annual textile waste and a workforce of millions already doing last-mile collection — is exactly what Mayank Singh and Ayush Saxena saw when they founded Tooused.
The Problem Nobody Talks About
India’s textile waste crisis is staggering in its scale and surprisingly simple in its cause. Every year, Indian households, corporates, and institutions discard millions of tonnes of usable clothing. Less than 15% is recovered. The rest is incinerated or buried.
The reason is not indifference. Surveys consistently show that people want to responsibly give back their clothes. The reason is infrastructure. There is no reliable, convenient, rewarding system to receive used textiles at scale. The first mile of reverse logistics for clothing simply does not exist in India.
So clothes pile up in wardrobes. Or get thrown away. Or get passed along informally, with no traceability of where they go.
The Insight
When Mayank and Ayush began mapping the problem, they kept arriving at the same answer: the workforce to solve this already exists. The Kabadiwalas and Raddiwalas — India’s informal waste collectors — walk every neighbourhood, every day, building trust with households over years and decades. They are the original last-mile logistics network. They just had never been organised, equipped, or paid fairly.
Tooused calls them SATHI Partners. The word means companion. It is deliberate.
The insight was not to replace them with a startup fleet. It was to bring them inside the system. Give them an app. Give them a pickup schedule. Give them a fair, per-collection payment. And watch what happens when an informal workforce becomes a formalised reverse logistics network.
What happens, it turns out, is a 30 to 40% increase in their monthly income. And a collection network that covers an entire city without Tooused owning a single vehicle.
How It Works
A consumer downloads the Tooused app. She buys a Give Back Bag, fills it with clothes she no longer needs, and schedules a doorstep pickup. A Sathi Partner arrives, collects the bag, and the clothes enter a traceable recovery chain. She earns credits, redeemable in the Tooused marketplace. The clothes get sorted into reuse or recycling, with every garment logged on a live blockchain.
For corporates, Tooused runs organised collection drives tied to CSR commitments and EPR compliance under forthcoming CPCB regulations. For institutions like the Indian Air Force, which has signed an MOU covering all 151 stations across the country, Tooused delivers structured, pan-India textile recovery at scale.
Three channels. One network. One Sathi Partner at the centre of all of it.
The Numbers
Tooused has grown revenue from Rs.26 lakhs to Rs.70 lakhs in a single year, and this year is on track to close at Rs.2 crore in topline. It has 3.5 lakh registered users and a 48% repeat rate — meaning nearly half of everyone who uses Tooused comes back. A credit redemption rate of around 80% tells the rest of the story: people are not just participating; they are finding real value in it.
The Indian Air Force MOU is perhaps the most striking signal. A national defence institution, spanning 151 stations across India, is trusting a young startup to handle its textile recovery at scale. It is the kind of institutional validation that takes most companies a decade to earn.
The Bigger Vision
Tooused is not, at its core, a textile company. It is a reverse logistics company that started with textiles because that is where the gap was most visible and most solvable.
The Sathi Partner who picks up your old kurta today can pick up your old phone tomorrow. And your cardboard the day after. Every category added to the network compounds the income of every Sathi Partner in it. The infrastructure being built now, for clothes, is the foundation for India’s urban reverse logistics economy.
That is the real bet: that the man with the cart and the bell, equipped with an app and a fair payment, becomes the backbone of how India recycles everything.
Why It Matters
There are companies building sustainability products for the top of the market. Premium, design-forward, aspirational. Tooused is building for the street. For the household that wants to do the right thing but has no system to do it through. For the Sathi Partner who has been doing this work for thirty years and deserves to earn more from it. For the brands that will face mandatory EPR compliance and need a partner who can actually prove the textiles were recovered.
It is infrastructure. Unglamorous, essential, and until now, completely absent.
Mayank Singh and Ayush Saxena are building it. One doorstep at a time.
Tooused is headquartered in Gurugram, Haryana. www.tooused.com*