Meet the SupplyCompass Deadstock Library
“Seeing all this fabric sitting unused in these factories planted a seed in me,” says Supply Compass co-founder Flora Davidson.
Fashion has many problems and waste is a big one. Globally, the fashion sector produces about 53m tonnes of fibre every year, says the Ellen MacArthur Foundation. More than 70% of that is burnt or ends up in landfill, while less than 1% is re-used to make new clothes. Less talked about is the problem of deadstock, fabric left over from previous seasons or unable to be sold due to minor defects or short-sighted production plans and eventually sent to landfill. Minimum yardage required for every sample and monetary incentives often allotted for bulk orders don’t help.
This is changing. Last year, Raeburn launched Raefound (tagline: “Nothing new, nothing wasted”), a non-seasonal range of unworn military clothing and accessories personally sourced and reworked by Christopher Raeburn himself. British designer Priaya Ahlualia turns deadstock and vintage into bold, graphic menswear. For a recent collection, Ahluwalia sourced jeans from a factory in Tunisia that uses organic and recycled cotton, while her shirting was pieced together from excess fabrics from the Portuguese clothing manufacturer Scoop.
The new guard are particularly excited. University of Applied Arts Vienna student Cristoph Rumpf won the Hyères festival with a capsule created mainly from deadstock, citing flea markets as inspiration. “It would be kind of boring to launch another brand by making tons of new clothes,” he told Business of Fashion. Meanwhile, London-based menswear designer, 2017 LVMH Prize nominee, Future British Award winner and star of Netflix’s Net in Fashion - Daniel W Fletcher made headlines with a patchwork denim dress that featured scraps collected from other contestants on the reality show.
Now, a new platform is making sure that these designers find what they want, when they want, allowing them to browse deadstock options just as they used to choose virgin materials each season. Launched last year, the SupplyCompass Deadstock Library is a collaboration between the UK-based sustainable production software company and a NYC technology company Queen of Raw, which matches buyers with brands looking to offload excess fabrics. Blockchain tech aids transparency around wasted inventory, including water, toxins, energy.
The result? More sustainable collections, value created from waste, circularity championed. It’s partly the COVID effect. Suppliers are closed and travel has been off the cards. Meanwhile, the pandemic has left brands with tons of unsold inventory and manufacturers saddled with leftover fabric from cancelled orders. During lockdown, 90 percent of brands reaching out to SupplyCompass for the first time asked about deadstock; in the six months prior, that figure was 35 percent. Similarly, Queen of Raw has seen an 80 percent spike in transactions since the onset of the pandemic.
SupplyCompass aims for 10 percent of its total projected sourcing volume of five million metres to be deadstock by the end of 2021. It’s been a long dream of co-founder Flora Davidson: “In the first two years of SupplyCompass, I was living in Mumbai and spending most of my time in factories, just to understand the problem first hand and find out how to build the software that actually works for factories, suppliers and tanneries etc. Seeing all this fabric sitting unused in these factories planted a seed in me, even though that wasn’t the initial problem we were solving.
“People now know more about what’s going on in their supply chain and how to do better going forward, but for now the volume out there is staggering,” ays Stephanie Benedetto, Queen of Raw.
“As we started to build SupplyCompass, we saw the issue that really stops brands being reactive and bringing product to market faster is materials. Material is key to everything in the supply chain. If you can get that fast, you can do things much much more effectively. And it’s often where a lot of the impact of a product is held so deadstock really provides a huge opportunity. We’re not looking at 100% of our brands using 100% deadstock for their collections, but providing it as an option for them.” And there are other benefits to encouraging the use of deadstock, beyond tackling waste.
Using unwanted fabrics can help brands cut costs, save on water and waste and reduce shipping needs by sourcing fabrics close to their manufacturing facilities. “Deadstock is cheaper than new fabric and can be delivered faster, reduce production times and slash the volume of resources used to make a garment,” writes Vogue Business writer Rachel Cernansky. “It can help brands that want to place smaller orders by sidestepping minimums and may also help suppliers earn back some income lost when brands cancel orders. It also gives brands a way to manage unsold inventory.”
In SupplyCompass’ wider mission to make sustainability accessible and cost effective, the deadstock initiative rates high. But Cernansky raises concerns: that the “burgeoning deadstock market enables companies to skirt the real problem of overproduction - and that, at worst, it could even promote intentional production of deadstock, exacerbating the issue.” Factories might even over-order from mills if they know they might be able to resell the excess to smaller designers as deadstock, Rachel Faller, owner of zero waste brand Tonlé, tells Cernansky.
The key is that using up deadstock runs alongside supplier plans to reduce the amount of fabric they don’t use. “Whether the quantities of fabric surpluses will start to come down — as more designers use waste fabric to begin with, as they turn to smaller orders, and as there’s more awareness of the waste built into the existing process — remains unclear,” writes Cernansky. One step at a time, replies Stephanie Benedetto, Co-Founder & CEO of Queen of Raw: “People now know more about what’s going on in their supply chain and how to do better going forward, but for now the volume out there is staggering. That’s what we’re focusing on.”
