Garnet Hill Second Nature
Image courtesy Garnet Hill
Fifty Years of Fabric That Lasts — And How Tersus Helps Keep it in Circulation
Most resale programs fail for an unglamorous reason: the products simply aren’t crafted to last. Fast fashion is engineered to a price, not a lifespan.
Garnet Hill was built on the opposite premise. The company was founded in 1976 when Pegge Kirschner and Grant Dowse returned from Europe with a set of English cotton flannel sheets meticulously made to offer natural warmth — and to last generations. What followed was a thoughtful assortment of products devoted to natural fibers, built with a community of friends and artisans. Fifty years on, the company’s mission still reads “quality and excellence,” and it still responsibly sources nature’s finest fibers like organic cotton, merino wool, cashmere, and European linen.
The company recently launched Garnet Hill Second Nature, a resale marketplace where customers can buy preloved Garnet Hill pieces. Tersus Solutions is proud to be the logistics and cleaning partner behind it, working alongside Archive, the technology platform powering the storefront.
Image courtesy Garnet Hill & Archive
The best fibers only get you to the warehouse door. What happens next determines whether a preloved piece arrives at its second owner in a condition worth paying for. What happens at our facility. Items arrive at our Colorado facility and are handled one at a time. Every piece is inspected individually and graded against Garnet Hill's high standards, because a resale program is only as trustworthy as the worst item it ships. Pieces that need cleaning are routed to the right process for the fiber and the type/degree of soil. Bedding is cleaned as a matter of course. Once restored, each item is folded, stored, and held for its second life.
That grading step is the quiet foundation of the whole program. A customer buying preloved is making a bet on consistency, and the only way to honor it is to make the same judgment call on every piece, every time.
Tersus sorts, identifies, tags, cleans, folds and bags each and every Garnet Hill item listed on the Garnet Hill Second Nature Website.
Why liquid CO₂
Most items that need cleaning go through our patented liquid CO₂ process. Some don't — a handful of stains genuinely come out better in water, and when that's the case, we wash in water. The goal is a piece good enough to sell again, not a perfect score on a single metric. But CO₂ is the default, and water is the exception.
The environmental case is the headline. For a resale program, the product case may matter more. Water-based industrial laundering is rough on exactly the fibers Garnet Hill is known for. Mechanical agitation in water felts wool and cashmere. Hot industrial drying shrinks cotton, sets creases in linen, and flattens the loft out of down. Do that to a preloved sweater and you have converted a resale item into a donation.
CO₂ doesn't agitate the way a washer does, and nothing ever sees a hot dryer. The fiber comes out of the process essentially as it went in, minus the soil. On a brand-new garment, the difference is marginal. On a garment already carrying five years of wear, it is the difference between resale-grade and not.
What else we clean
The same process and the same facility handle some of the most demanding textile work in the country. We clean technical outerwear for outdoor brands without stripping durable water-repellent finishes. We process recovered down, where the entire economic value of the material is its loft — the one thing conventional laundering destroys. We clean firefighter turnout gear, where independent testing has shown the CO₂ process removes over 98% of carcinogens and outperformed water across bioburden, and PAHs. We can clean cleanroom textiles, where the process surpassed water-based cleaning in both particle and bioburden removal.
A cashmere wrap is a gentler assignment than turnout gear. That's the point. The tolerance the process was built to hold is well beyond what preloved apparel requires, which is why we can be confident about what arrives at the customer's door.
Bedding is its own category
Home and bedding carry a regulatory layer most apparel doesn't. Reselling preloved bedding isn't simply a matter of cleaning it well and a number of states require that secondhand bedding and filling materials be processed by a permitted facility using an approved method, and labeled accordingly. It's the reason bedding is one of the categories brands most often leave out of resale programs.
Tersus holds sanitization certification for bedding, which allows certified items to be resold in states that require it. We also hold a sterilization permit from IDFL, the International Down and Feather Laboratory, for CO₂ cleaning of down and feather fill, the first such permit issued for a CO₂ process, and the credential that governs whether recovered down can re-enter commerce.
For a brand that has sold flannel sheets since 1976, that matters. As Second Nature expands into home categories, the certification is already in place.
The numbers behind it
Across all Tersus partner programs in 2025, the technology saved 1.3 million gallons of water and 232,000 kWh of energy, avoided 165 tons of carbon emissions, and kept more than 1.3 million pounds of textiles out of landfills. That last figure is the one that matters most to a program like this one. Water and energy savings are the byproduct of a better process. Keeping over one million pounds of well-made product in circulation is the actual objective.
Tersus Solutions 2025 impact numbers across all brands.
Made to be passed on
Garnet Hill Second Nature launched recently with a curated assortment of apparel and select bedding. A peer-to-peer model is also featured, inviting customers to sell pieces directly to one another for cash or credit.
Fifty years ago, two people stapled fabric swatches into a catalog because the quality was the point. It still is, for owner after owner.
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