A new startup based in Rogers is looking to combine the technical skills of garment repair with the technology mindset of a food delivery app. Upkept was incorporated in April 2025 by founder and CEO Robin Wallis Atkinson. She recently came to the Bruce and Ann Applegate News Studio Two to discuss the startup, and says she first started thinking about this gap in the market back in 2024.
Robin Wallis Atkinson: The true story is I was sitting at my desk, crisscross applesauce, as I always do, and I rearranged my foot and I kicked through the crotch of my pants in a meeting, and I kind of had an uh-oh moment of, OK, well, I can walk out of this room and hand my pants over to somebody at a sewing table and have them fixed. But what if you don't work in a sewing studio? What are your options? And so I became really kind of obsessed with this idea of, are there any apparel repair options on the table for the normal consumer. And I did a lot of research into how many tailor shops are there in the United States and what is the public usage of tailor shops, and what does the waste problem look like? Because we aren't repairing clothes. And I learned that 90% of Americans are not going to the tailor. The clothing waste crisis is through the roof, and Americans are throwing away 81.5 pounds of apparel individually every year. And I just think we can do better. And so I came up with this idea of what if there was an online easy way to order apparel repair and we make it as easy as DoorDash.
Moore: Every time I have experienced going to a tailor, it has been me walking into a creaky old building, and it's always me walking up to a probably first-generation American who marks up my pants. I hand them over to him, and then I come back two days later and my pants are fixed. I don't know how sustainable that is as a business, of me just going into a place and saying, I need this done, I'm going to come back three days later and it's going to be done.
Wallis Atkinson: So the data shows that there are 3,300 tailor shops in the United States, which is 100,000 Americans per tailor shop. The numbers are already pretty bad. It also shows that tailors are aging out of the industry 13% annually and they're not being backfilled.
I am obsessed with the problem of sewn trades in the United States. I have been since 2020. And what I know is that when we offshored apparel production, we also cut all educational programming that would teach you anything about sewing. And so, as these experts who largely come to the United States from other backgrounds — they're coming with expertise they learned somewhere else, and they're largely not training anyone to replace them. We don't have a robust apprenticeship program in the United States. Not here in Arkansas, certainly, but largely in the United States. And so it's an informal economy. And anytime you have an informal economy of artisans who are aging out of an industry, you've got a real cliff you're walking off of.
And so that is part of the sort of impetus for me to hit the ground running so fast — this hole in the market that we've identified, which is actually getting worse over time. It wasn't going to stay unnoticed forever. But when I identified the problem, it was a kind of very ripe moment for what a solution could look like. It is a trade that has not been updated in about 100 years. And everyone is busy. Informal economies in the age of connectedness are not the solution for everyone. And so I'm not interested in replacing tailor shops per se. I think there's a lot of things that we can't do at Upkept. I really should not be doing the shoulders on your blazer. Certainly not going to do your wedding dress. There is a skill set in that trade that cannot be done over the phone. But there's also a lot of stuff that can be done. Hemming pants is not rocket science. You safety pin them, you send them in, we send them back. Or if you rip a hole in the crotch of your pants, we can fix that. I like to say our sweet spot is hems, holes and seams. And if we can fix the 30% of clothes that we imagine are going to the landfill because of small tears, I think that's a net win.
Overall, it's probably fair to say in the last five or six years it's become much more popular, the idea of fast fashion. We're seeing companies who are creating micro trends. They're creating clothing that comes out more than once a quarter — sometimes monthly or even weekly sorts of trends.
Matthew Moore: And I think it's fair to say because of that, we're seeing a deterioration in the quality of the clothing, that people are more likely to buy stuff more frequently because the quality of the stuff they're buying is not as high as it used to be. .How do you think your company can combat that sort of fast fashion conundrum of the clothing is not very high quality, so what's the point in keeping it, and instead buy more expensive, higher quality clothing that can be mended and kept longer?
Atkinson: So yes, what you've identified is the 52 seasons a year problem that we've got with Shein. And I think there's a few ways the market moves around this. The easiest one for me is the calculation of cost per wear. And so if you're paying $7 for a top and you get one wear out of it, the cost per wear was $7. If you buy — now I'm going to try to do math live, we'll see how it goes — if you buy a $200 jacket and you wear it 200 times, that's a $1 cost per wear. So it is kind of a calculus of how long do you want to keep the garment.
I think that Upkept comes in at an interesting intersection where we actually propose you could even make your fast fashion slow if you choose to fix it. So if you choose to keep something in your wardrobe nine months longer than you would have originally kept it, you can reduce its carbon footprint by 30%. That's an insane statistic that shows you how fast things are cycling through our households. So I think markets move for consumers — that's just all they do. And so if consumers start to make better, slower choices, they will be potentially delivered better, slower options.
Moore: Did you anticipate having this sort of dual role as like working with consumers, but also a B2B sort of relationship? Was that the original idea or did it just kind of happen because you were looking for some good, consistent operational income coming in?
Atkinson: So the plan has always been to be a direct consumer brand because it's the market that I believe is largest. I've also always known that we would have to go through business to business to get to direct to consumer, because you've got to have throughput somehow — you have to have reliable units coming through the door. And the first repair programs that I was involved with were built through Interform for brands, and so I already knew how those were built. I knew what that infrastructure would look like. So it was always part of the plan. I did not think it would happen as quickly as it could happen. Nothing is signed and sealed yet, but I've moved my timeline up considerably.
So the goal is sort of, launch direct to consumer so people know that it's there, pressure test this industry and find out all the different ways it's going to be almost impossible to build. And then for volume and stability, go through brand partnerships, because everywhere I can get a brand partnership and not raise a venture dollar is better for me in the long run.
Moore: One of the things that I hear from you that you're passionate about is workforce development, and how there's really a gap in this next generation of people who know how to mend, who know how to sew, who know how to repair. Why is that such a passion for you?
Atkinson: I became incredibly passionate about workforce development when I was at Interform in 2020, when I built my first small batch manufacturing unit. It was during the pandemic, and I saw a real need for PPE. There were no face masks. I knew people that could sew and we could probably build face masks. So we rushed together a core of people to sew face masks. And what I learned through this process was that the folks who had the capability of stepping in and filling that role were often folks from largely immigrant and refugee communities that had a cultural relationship to sewn trades that I simply was unaware of before.
And so over the years, building programming at Interform, I really started to learn that if I was going to build something sustainable at scale to provide real workforce opportunities to folks who I believed, honestly, have earned them, there would have to be a different and larger business model at play. Because ultimately, if you're not tapping into demand, you can't create roles. So we spent several years building workforce programs at Interform. And the core issue I saw at the end of all of them was, OK, and now what? Where do they go? What jobs are available? And I learned that it was going to be much harder than originally anticipated to find those placements.
And so at a certain moment, I sort of decided if we're going to build a workforce program, we have to build the placements first. And so it kind of flipped my thinking on its head. I am really passionate about people being paid for skills, and that came from a background in the arts, where I really wanted artists to get paid for skills. And then I learned about the gutting of the American apparel industry, and it just became something that I felt like, certainly this can be fixed — and that might be delusion, thinking that one lady from Arkansas can put a dent in that. But it's not rocket science, it's just unit economics and logistics and a lot of business moving.
So it has been weird to shift away — I don't work in art at all anymore. I have 20 years of running arts nonprofits. To not be in that water anymore is quite strange. But it also just came down to where can I have the most effect and where am I not really needed? There are a lot of really brilliant people doing a lot of really amazing arts programming, especially in Northwest Arkansas. Do I need to be the one doing that, or do I need to be the one trying to build these jobs that I'm apparently obsessed with?
Robin Wallis Atkinson is the founder and CEO of Upkept. You can find more details about the company at upkept.io.
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