Finalist
Carmen Gama
Recovering, repairing, remanufacturing, and recycling the clothes New Yorkers throw away
- Year
- 2022
- Organization
- MAKE ANEEW
- Sector
- Environment & Sustainability
- Borough
- Manhattan
Carmen moved to NYC from Mexico to become a fashion designer. While pursuing a BFA at Parsons, she saw opportunities beyond front-end design into clothing’s next life — reclaiming value from discarded items to create sustainable circular design solutions. She began by helping brands like Eileen Fisher set up processes and find scalable solutions for all their unsellable inventory from their take back program. Now, Carmen and co-founder Carolina Bedoya are leveraging 20 years of industry experience to build MAKE ANEEW, a company that helps brands develop “post-consumer operations” like take-back programs, resale, remanufacturing, repair and fiber-to-fiber recycling. Carmen and Carolina are changing the fashion industry, one garment at a time.