From upcycling brand to upcycling infrastructure: COM/VERGE Episode 3 with Michael Pfeifer

COM/VERGE — The Business and Art of Fashion Upcycling — sits down with a founder who came to upcycling from the outside. Angie Aguirre talks with Michael Pfeifer, CEO and co-founder of MOOT, for a conversation that moves from a football stadium banner to the promise that if upcycling ever succeeds completely so there is no more textile waste, MOOT stops.

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Remember Henry Ford?

In the early 1900s, the automobile was a handmade object — assembled one at a time, by craftsmen, each car a singular piece of work. It was the era Henry Ford revolutionized car production, driven by the vision that automobiles should be widely available to far more people. Something similar is happening in upcycling now, with Michael Pfeifer, CEO and co-founder of MOOT, at the front of it.

MOOT started in 2020, during the lockdown. Six years later, led by the vision to scale the impact of business for good, the MOOT name has become synonymous with industrial upcycling — running Upcycling-as-a-Service for some of Germany's largest companies.

The Power Mix of Business School and Fashion School

Maybe this path comes from the founder mix. Michael didn't train as a fashion designer. He studied business administration across Mannheim, Bilbao, and Lisbon, then worked corporate and startup jobs. Nils, his co-founder and a trained fashion designer, had watched donated textiles get thrown away by the recycler simply because nobody could redistribute them. Together, they decided that needed to change. Their start — 20 T-shirts made from bed sheets — faced criticism and skepticism from the beginning. They stayed true to the idea anyway.

Not every part of the story was a straight line. MOOT started as a B2C brand, opened two physical stores in Berlin, and closed both in 2024. From the outside, closing stores reads as a signal of failure. It was, in fact, the pivot that changed everything — the moment the mix of the two founders' backgrounds, the numbers, and the impact vision all pointed the same direction: if MOOT was going to create meaningful impact for society, it wasn't going to happen through retail.

What made that pivot possible to see clearly was a decision about how MOOT measures itself in the first place. Michael describes it as the single biggest learning of these six years: folding economic, social, and environmental KPIs into one measurement, so that growing revenue and growing impact are in fact the same thing — the more upcycled products MOOT sells, the more material stays in circulation and out of landfill. Scaling sales and scaling impact became the same calculation, not a trade-off that forces a founder to choose between doing well and doing good.

Leaving the Bubble

The most deliberate decision MOOT has made isn't a product decision at all — it's who they choose to talk to. Michael is direct about this: he doesn't think the sustainability and upcycling world can push the movement forward by talking mostly to itself. So instead of spending energy convincing people who are already convinced, MOOT went looking for partners with no relationship to sustainable fashion at all — a football association, a logistics company, public transport operators. People inside those organizations aren't in the upcycling conversation. But through them, MOOT reaches everyone around them who isn't either. To Michael, that's not a side effect of the B2B pivot. It's the actual point of it.

One Product, More Than a Thousand Words

That reach matters because Michael has a specific answer for the criticism that upcycling, by putting more product into the world, just feeds the same consumerism it claims to fight. 

Someone who buys a MOOT piece without even realizing it's upcycled, then finds out it used to be a DHL uniform or a stadium banner, doesn't just own an object — they start telling other people about it, unprompted. That conversation, repeated across hundreds of thousands of pieces already in circulation, does more to shift how people think about waste and consumption than campaigns aimed at people who were already paying attention. A story stitched into a product travels further than an argument.

A Different Kind of Creativity

None of that works if the product itself isn't good — and this is where the real tension in the conversation shows up. Michael's co-founder leads MOOT's design team, and their daily brief is different from what most fashion designers are solving for. It's not about maximizing design elements or building the single most interesting piece possible. It's building something that can be made with the least effort that still holds up — visually and structurally — well enough to sell at volume to a B2B partner. 

Michael calls it plainly: the fight isn't for the best product, it's for the best-selling one. That's a genuine trade-off from a one-of-a-kind, piece-by-piece upcycling practice. But it's also, in his telling, its own form of creativity — solving a new kind of design problem every time a new type of waste material comes in, at industrial scale.

The Waste Generator Keeps the Sale

The business structure underneath all of this solves one of the key challenges independent upcyclers face today. In MOOT's B2B model, the company generating the waste is also the one selling the finished product — MOOT isn't responsible for marketing or moving units, only for the transformation. That single choice is what let MOOT stop competing for a customer's attention and start operating as infrastructure for companies that already have one.

One Bigger Vision

Seen from outside, industrial-scale upcycling and one-of-a-kind upcycling can look like two different, even contradictory, worlds — one optimizing for volume and reach, the other for uniqueness and craft. But in fact, they're different systems built by people chasing the same cultural shift: making it normal, not niche, to treat a discarded material as something with life left in it. Whether that happens one carefully made piece at a time, or ten thousand products a month, it's the same movement doing the work at a different scale.

Making Upcycling Mainstream 

Ford's mass production model didn't stay his alone for long. Once it worked, competitors adopted it, refined it, and the moving assembly line eventually became the standard the whole auto industry ran on — not because Ford tried to protect it, but because an idea built to reach that many people rarely stays contained to the one company that started it. Michael talks about MOOT's B2B model in almost the same terms. He doesn't see other upcycling businesses building similar partnerships as competition — he sees them as the fastest way to change culture and get more waste out of landfills than MOOT could ever manage on its own. It's an open invitation, not a trade secret: work directly with the companies generating the waste, use the model, and help make upcycled products as familiar as the family car. 

What If the Waste Runs Out?

Angie put the hardest question of the conversation to him directly: if upcycling actually succeeds at reducing how much waste the world generates, what happens to a business built on processing it? Michael promised, on the record, that if MOOT ever reaches a point where there's no more waste worth rescuing, they'll stop the business immediately. It's an unusual thing for a CEO to promise — betting his own company's future against its own success — but it lines up with everything else in this conversation. 

For Michael, the product was never the real return. The impact was. If the day ever comes when there's no waste left to save, that's not a threat to MOOT. It's the biggest win the company could ask for.

Catch the full episode of COM/VERGE wherever you listen — including what, out of everything in the world, Michael would still like to upcycle.

Listen to Episode 3>

COM/VERGE is produced by RIVED, the digital ecosystem for fashion upcyclers.