By Jorge Mercado Sunday, April 26th, 2026

After 24 years, Kimberly Lau decided she wanted to leave the wealth management business. Nothing was particularly wrong; she just knew she wanted to make a bigger difference.

And she ended up finding that passion in an unexpected place — her teenage sons’ closets.

“Especially a few years ago, I would help them clean up, and I would find an enormous amount of waste in there,” Lau told the Business Times. “Some clothes still had the tags, some clothes were barely worn at all, and I just thought to myself, ‘What are we doing here?’”

The more Lau researched, the more she noticed the incredible amount of waste in the fashion industry and its toll on the environment. For example, it takes 1,800 to 2,000 gallons of water to make one pair of cotton jeans. 

So, she wanted to do something about it. Enter Project ReWear.

Founded in December 2024 by Lau and her co-founder/COO, Linda Young, the company aims to reduce textile waste by keeping clothes out of landfills and making sustainable fashion affordable.

“We’re hoping to redefine what it means to rewear clothing, and the whole goal is we’re trying to keep clothing in motion, like circular fashion action and create real impact,” Lau said.

Lau met her co-founder while volunteering at a thrift store. Young has a background in retail management and global brand development, making her the perfect partner to help develop a new type of business.

“This business was really just born from two moms who saw too much waste and came up with one big idea,” Lau said.

What separates Project ReWear from traditional and larger thrift stores is its business model, which Lau calls its “four impact pathways.

Project ReWear has a storefront in Thousand Oaks, which has donated clothing for sale for $2 to $18, with a key emphasis on keeping those prices low. 

It also has a warehouse in Newbury Park, where employees (Project ReWear has eight part-time employees) separate clothing from stuff that will show up to its Thousand Oaks store to “bundles of kindness” packages that will be given to the homeless.

There is also a pile of clothes that are deemed “unwearable,” but instead of throwing them out like larger thrift stores, Project ReWear is keeping the clothes at its warehouse, hoping to add a seamstress in the near future who could fix a lot of the clothing and put it back on the shelves.

Finally, the warehouse also has huge sales on occasion, allowing people to buy clothes at an even larger discount.

“The reason for that is we want to be affordable and accessible to all,” Lau said. “Because if there is so much clothing on the planet, the whole point is not to sit here and have this huge profit margin between each item. It’s actually to have a lower margin, but sell a lot more.”

Project ReWear also has an online storefront, which actually does not sell the donated clothes, but rather is a curated collection of articles of clothing from other thirft stores purchased by the founders as a way to keep the circular fashion economy going. Items on the site sell for $18 to $88.

The warehouse, storefront and online presence all launched at the same time, something that was very key for Lau.

“Most businesses would start with just one, but in order to really show and to build this movement and gain a community of followers and people that are loyal and understand that we can all work together, I felt like it had to be done together,” Lau said. “To truly follow the mission, which is keeping circular fashion in action, you have to have all these pathways. Otherwise, we would probably be like every other thrift store or reseller.”

The fourth impact pathway is new, however, as Project ReWear has just launched its Don8 Incentive Program, rewarding people for donating clothing and keeping items in circulation.

Lau said by incentivizing people and also showing them the direct impact they have in the weighted amount of clothes donated, it helps to continue to “build the movement.

Since opening their doors in December 2024, Project ReWear has already helped divert over 13,800 pounds of clothing from landfills. It calculates this by weighing the donated clothes as well as weighing the clothes sold in-store, online or at the warehouse to see its direct impact.

“I knew Project ReWear was going to be something, I just didn’t realize how fast, how well received and how much support we’d be getting from the community,” Lau said.

Though the company is not yet profitable, Lau said she believes that it is coming. Moreover, the company is “making a difference.”

“What we’re doing is building a blueprint, hopefully a scalable blueprint, and building the processes and systems now so we can actually replicate this in other cities,” Lau said.

Lau, whose birthday is on Earth Day, April 22, said that her favorite quote is one frequently attributed to Mark Twain: “The two most important days of your life are the day you are born and the day you find out why.”

“I found my why,” she said.

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