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Christina Schwarzkopf is co-founder of Prolong, a business-to-business white-label software solution enabling fashion brands and retailers to offer and manage circular aftercare and aftersales services. Those services could include repair, cleaning, personalization, exchanges, and refunds.
Christina combines her commercial, strategy, and sustainability expertise built over a decade of fashion experience with brands like Calvin Klein, Tommy Hilfiger, and Zalando.
Prolong works with brands like Belstaff, The North Face, Veja, and Fusalp, covering apparel, outdoor, footwear, and jewellery, as well as multi-brand retailers.
Brands use Prolong to digitize and automate service journeys across channels, reducing operational complexity, increasing customer satisfaction, and driving loyalty. The platform integrates logistics, communication, and brand operations to simplify often fragmented service processes.
By linking customers, brands, and service providers, Prolong enables circularity at scale and helps brands move from one-off sales to ongoing, service-driven relationships. This makes aftercare a strategic business opportunity that’s aligned with sustainability and regulatory demands.
We’ll hear how the Prolong platform combines complex workflows into a single system, helping brands extend product lifespan and build stronger customer relationships, improving customer satisfaction and loyalty.
Christina talks us through the value proposition for brands and service partners, and explains how Prolong supports service partners by providing steady business and connecting them to a growing global network.
Christina also shares some of the challenges and opportunities for brands, and offers tips on how to help customers discover, and access repair and aftercare services.
Podcast host Catherine Weetman helps businesses use circular, regenerative and fair solutions to do better, with less.
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Read on for more on our guest and links to the people, organisations and other resources we mention.
Links for our guest:
- Prolong.io on Linkedin
- Prolong.io Website
- WeCareWeRepair community
- Christina Schwarzkopf on LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/in/christinaschwarzkopf/
Books, people and organisations we mentioned
- Survey on job satisfaction: Not just about the money: pioneering study reveals best and worst jobs in UK https://www.theguardian.com/money/2022/sep/09/jobs-full-earnings-wellbeing-income-gap-uk and the report, co-authored by Andrew Clark, Maria Cotofan and Richard Layard: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4114863
- Episode 159 Kyle Wiens of iFixit: the rewards of repairability Kyle Wiens is the co-founder of iFixit, the international repair community known for open-source repair manuals and product teardown. https://www.rethinkglobal.info/159-kyle-wiens-of-ifixit-the-rewards-of-repairability/
- Episode 154 Loic Le Fouest of Clarasys: creating circular customer experiences https://www.rethinkglobal.info/154-loic-le-fouest-of-clarasys-designing-circular-customer-experiences/
- Episode 144 Chris Allen of Decathlon: ever-evolving circular design https://www.rethinkglobal.info/144-chris-allen-of-decathlon-ever-evolving-circular-design/
- Episode 55 Anthony Burns – ACS https://www.rethinkglobal.info/episode-55-anthony-burns-acs/
Guest bio
Prolong’s Co-founder Christina Schwarzkopf brings over a decade of fashion experience with brands like Calvin Klein, Tommy Hilfiger, and Zalando, combining commercial, strategy, and sustainability expertise to drive Prolong’s mission.
Prolong is a B2B white-label software solution that enables fashion brands and retailers to offer and manage circular aftercare and aftersales services—such as repair, cleaning, personalization, exchanges, and refunds—across product categories, markets, and service partners. Its platform consolidates complex workflows into a single system, helping brands extend product lifespan and build stronger customer relationships.
Prolong works with brands like Belstaff, The North Face, Veja, and Fusalp, covering apparel, outdoor, footwear, and jewelry, as well as multibrand retailers. The platform simplifies fragmented service processes by integrating logistics, communication, and brand operations.
Brands use Prolong to digitize and automate service journeys across channels, reducing operational complexity, increasing customer satisfaction, and driving loyalty. It also supports service partners by providing steady business and connecting them to a growing global network. By linking customers, brands, and service providers, Prolong enables circularity at scale and helps brands move from one-time sales to ongoing, service-driven relationships. This makes aftercare a strategic business opportunity aligned with sustainability and regulatory demands.
If you’re new to the circular economy, you might like the ‘getting started’ playlist. There’s also an interactive podcast index, making it easy to find episodes on each of the key circular economy strategies or for a specific market sector. And to dig deeper, please check out Catherine’s award-winning A Circular Economy Handbook, published by Kogan Page.
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