Alexandra Meyer
Published November 28, 2025 3:32pm
Updated November 28, 2025 3:33pm
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Brothers Josh and Zac Hemby are on a mission to save lost fashion gems (Picture: Messina Hembry)
When you picture the fabric going to landfill, you probably imagine rags no longer fit for wear — not one-off designer dresses or clothes once donned by celebs.
But two brothers working together to sell vintage, pre-loved fashion have created a business that unearths these lost gems, selling them on for a tidy profit.
Now, they recycle on average 1,500 items of clothing a day and stop 50 shipping containers of clothes going to landfill each year.
And let’s be frank: the destruction of a vest once worn by David Beckham would be a true tragedy.
Zac Hembry, 33, founded Messina Hembry when he was at university in London. When he finished his studies, he enlisted his brother Josh, 36, to work alongside him in the business.
Messina Hembry now generates £10million in revenue a year, employs 100 staff and the pair have sold everything from Burberry trench coats to one-of-a-kind original band t-shirts.
Zac says: ‘I had always loved buying and selling on ebay and I got the idea of selling clothes when I wanted to make a little extra money. I was doing it from my dorm room, buying, washing and sending clothes, visiting the Post Office every day.
‘You never know what clothes you’re going to discover, it’s fascinating.
The brothers’ warehouse contains a staggering 500,000 items (Picture: Messina Hembry)
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Previous Page Next Page‘I learnt a lot about the knock-on effects of fashion, particularly which fabrics were not sustainable.’
After leaving university in 2014, he asked Josh, then an estate agent, if he would join him in the company.
He says: ‘We work well as a team. We split our tasks, Josh would take photos and I did data entry. While we rarely argue now, we did more at the start.
‘It has brought us closer together.’
After a brief spell of working from their parents home in Suffolk, as the company grew, they moved into a small workspace.
Zac says: ‘We moved into a rundown office, a storage cupboard at the bottom of a block of flats, and hired staff to help us with the clothes.’
They buy clothes in bulk from textiles recycling companies in Europe, the UK and the USA, keeping a close eye out for diamonds in the rough.Spotting a big money maker usually comes down to ‘a mix of luck and research’.
‘Our products tend to come in pretty randomly, so anything we discover is mostly through digging into the details,’ Zac says.
‘For the David Beckham item, for example, we knew it was an unusual and rare piece. After doing some research, we found out it was a one-of-one item sold in LA by designer Jerry Lorenzo. We then tracked down images of him wearing it and cross-checked all the details to authenticate it.
‘We also had a suit that was designed by Yves Saint Laurent specifically for a friend and his photographer.
‘For other items — like sportswear — we authenticate them by verifying whether they were match-worn.’
Their business model also highlights the scale of the turnover in the fashion industry. The 50,000sq ft Messina Hembry warehouse contains over 500,000 items of clothing, selling on average, 10,000 products a week.
Through recycling clothes destined otherwise for landfill, Messina Hembry helps to offset the equivalent of 5,000 cars’ worth of carbon dioxide emissions each year.
Zac believes there is a responsibility to slow fashion waste.
Zac says their business exposes fashion waste (Picture: Messina Hembry)
He says: ‘When you look into how much pollution has gone into producing the clothes, there has to be some accountability.
‘People fill a textile bag or drop their clothes at a recycling bank and forget about it, but there has to be more done.’
And Zac says awareness of clothes waste has come a long way, in the last 10 years. Early on they received cease-and-desist letters from large brands, objecting to their clothes being sold secondhand. This has dissipated as the company has got bigger, and as reducing fashion waste rises higher up the social agenda.
The brothers then faced the Covid-19 pandemic.
Zac says: ‘It was worrying from a staff point of view, a stress all businesses went through, and it was also a busy time for us, but it was tough to source clothes.’
Whilst Zac used his own money to found the company and early on was making ‘a few hundred pounds in sales’, the brothers now bring in a revenue of £10million.
And Zac is not content to stay still, saying: ‘We always want the next step.’
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Whilst the brothers do not count businesses such as Vinted or Depop, which have a less specific selling platform, as competitors, Zac believes there are other contenders on the fast-growing market, which Messina Hembry needs to navigate.
He hopes in the future to be able to use tools he has developed for his company to help in the charity sector, as well as starting more product lines and potentially considering consignment selling, on behalf of others.
‘I’d say my top tip to other entrepreneurs is to try new things all the time. If we try 20 new things, one of them might work out, and it’s persevering with the knowledge that 95% of things might be a waste of time, but that over the years, five or ten new things will work,’ he says.
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‘We’ve continued to develop and not just get stuck. It’s rewarding and wonderful to see that we have got to this point.’
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