When Brenna Hastings and Olivia Cuff started talking about fashion waste, it wasn’t over a pitch deck or spreadsheet. It was summer. They were both deep into their internships, decompressing after long days. Olivia had just come home from working at an apparel brand, frustrated by how much perfectly good clothing was being tossed before it ever hit shelves.
She’d been tasked with finding ways to make the company more sustainable. But what she saw wasn’t just a sustainability problem – it was a systems problem.
That night, she brought the challenge to Brenna, and the two started brainstorming.
“We both study industrial and systems engineering,” Brenna explains. “Our entire major is about improving processes. So we started thinking: how can we address this problem at scale, without asking brands to completely overhaul how they operate?”
From that conversation, Ragtag was born.
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Ragtag is building the missing infrastructure in fashion’s messy supply chain. Specifically, they’re creating a system to connect apparel brands directly with textile-to-textile recycling mills, offering an efficient, scalable path toward circularity.
“We collect pre-consumer waste garments from brands, sort them by fabric composition, and deliver them to the appropriate recycling mills,” they explain.
It’s an elegant solution to a huge problem. Fashion brands are eager to be more sustainable – but the logistics around excess inventory and waste recycling are clunky, expensive, and underdeveloped. Ragtag fixes that.
But designing the system was the easy part. Actually building a business around it – especially while juggling school and jobs – has been much harder.
“Our biggest challenge was the size of our idea,” they admit. “It involved so many players, so much capital, and we weren’t sure how to scale it down to something we could start on now.”
That’s where Future Founders came in.
Brenna and Olivia were selected for the 2025 Startup Bootcamp, a highly competitive program from Future Founders that supports young entrepreneurs through mentorship, community, and hands-on business development. Their biggest win? Clarity.
“Before Bootcamp, we had this huge, ambitious idea,” they say. “The program helped us narrow it down, define a true MVP, and focus on what we can build and test right now.”
They’re currently reaching out to fashion brands and textile mills with the goal of launching a pilot to validate their model. It’s real-world traction for a real-world problem. The Startup Bootcamp also gave them tools they hadn’t encountered in the classroom – especially around B2B sales, marketing, and customer discovery.
“With our engineering backgrounds, we didn’t have much exposure to the business side,” Olivia says. “Learning how to pitch, how to identify the right partners, how to actually sell this – that’s been a huge shift.”
As they move into Phase Two of the Bootcamp, they’re focused on outreach and relationship-building, with the goal of getting Ragtag into the hands of real brands and mills as soon as possible.
In a fashion industry full of vague sustainability promises, Ragtag stands out. It’s not a feel-good marketing campaign. It’s infrastructure. It’s logistics. It’s action.
And with Brenna and Olivia behind it, it’s gaining momentum fast.
This is what Future Founders Startup Bootcamp is all about – giving young entrepreneurs the guidance, tools, and confidence to take on big problems and make real progress.
Ragtag is just one example. But it’s a powerful one…and they’re just getting started.
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