As good as new
No longer the sole domain of artisanal practices, or of limited runs, upcycling and remanufacturing are progressively being applied on an industrial scale. The transforming of unused or unsold goods into new ones is not only motivated by sustainability concerns but also by ethics, economics, and legislation.
If asked to name the biggest, unnecessary and avoidable contributor to the apparel industry’s outsized environmental impact, waste could be a legitimate answer. The overproduction of textiles, supplies and finished garments is basically a black hole across the entire supply chain. For any production run, it is common practice for a factory or brand to order 3% to 10%, some say even 20%, surplus materials and components. Welcome to the world of deadstock. But that’s not all. Overproduction is also widespread in apparel manufacturing. Depending on sources, mostly anonymous, 25% to 33% of all the clothes (and shoes) made are never even sold. A guestimate, WSA has been told, is that this may in fact be at the low end of the spectrum. The French administration estimates that 10,000 to 20,000 tonnes of new textile products are destroyed every year in the country. It has taken measures to progressively phase out these practices in its Anti-Waste and Circular Economy law (AGEC), which came into effect in January 2022. It requires that large companies selling non-food items on its territory find ways to recirculate, donate or recycle unsold goods, or face fines.
From unused supplies to unsold finished goods, the nature of waste in fashion is multifaceted, but real-world solutions to turn them into a new resource are being implemented, and not only by small, super-sustainable brands. Nike and Decathlon, US outdoor brand Cotopaxi and Australian cycling company MAAP are showing the way to near industrial-scale solutions to make new products from excess inventory.
Deadstock can be fun
The bright and cheery colours that many Cotopaxi products feature have helped the company, founded in 2014, stand out in an outdoor market awash with brands navigating a sea of sameness. Their offbeat colourways and patched designs embody and could even be a poster child for upcycled aesthetics. Which they are. What the brand calls ‘repurposed material’, otherwise known as deadstock, is used to make three of its key product ranges, Del Dia packs, Teca windbreakers and Trico fleece jackets. In 2022, Cotopaxi says 1.6 million metres of leftover fabric were used in its Del Dia and Teca ranges.
“Our founding design team was looking for ways to reduce waste and has, from the start, taken a cradle-to-cradle approach to design,” chief product officer Karyn McKenna tells WSA. Davis Smith launched the brand with industry veterans, CJ Whittaker and Cherie Sanguinetti who conceptualised, started, and paved the way for the Del Dia programme to become what it is now, chimes in Erin Wyer, the brand’s press manager. “CJ Whittaker saw the warehouses full of fabric bolts first hand in the factories making packs for outdoor brands and worked out a system to find uses for this stock,” says Ms McKenna. The very first ‘repurposed’ product was a drawstring backpack made in a standard 400 denier fabric. These “beautiful accidents” or “wild misfits”, as she describes them, were given away at a festival and were an instant success.
Cotopaxi has since optimised and expanded its Repurposed programme. In its first stages, limited runs of 300 to 600 units, in a single colourway, were made from deadstock fabrics. This required that production managers knew how much material was available, which, she says, made the process challenging. “CJ Whittaker decided to keep the process simple by allowing for total randomness.” This made it possible to use bolts of 10 metres of fabric, and gave birth to the Del Dia pack series.
The brand’s three Repurposed product ranges use two types of standard leftover fabric, 400 denier textiles for packs and nylon taffetas for apparel. While the Del Dia packs feature truly random harmonies, they do nonetheless follow a few basic colour combination principles. Grey or brown tones are ruled out. “On a large surface, these shades tend to mute the harmonies,” says Ms McKenna. The fabrics can have texture, but need to be plain, no prints allowed. “We want to keep a clean look and feel, and to maximise what we can use,” she notes. To ensure the greatest variety, the cut pieces are randomly aggregated on the sewing floor and sewers are allowed a certain degree of liberty. The two other ranges, Teca and Trico, are produced in specific colourway runs. A designer chooses the colours that work well together from unused bolts of fabric. This implies that minimum quantities of deadstock be available to produce 3,000-unit runs of the given three-colour bands that adorn Trico fleece tops. This is industrial scale.
Melbourne-based cycling brand MAAP applies a similar principle and finds uses for leftover fabrics to make the multicoloured patched designs of its OffCuts collection. It has set up this system with its manufacturing partner LTP Group, a Danish company that operates five factories in Eastern Europe and one in Vietnam. The logistics were outlined in a LinkedIn post last year by a company manager. He describes a truly collaborative project with the brand’s designers to allow for varied, if not random, fabric and colour combinations.
Logistics & data
“For a garment manufacturer there are pros and cons to reusing leftover fabric for new collections. While the environmental benefit is clear, the business implications are diverse. The direct business benefit is to free up space in stocks and to reduce the cost of waste handling. It takes much more time, however, to design and construct a garment made of roll-ends,” the manager, who no longer works for LTP, wrote at the time. He went on to say that making such a process efficient relies on the digital tracing of stocks including data on colour, composition and consumption history. The challenge, he concluded, is to scale the model. Current LTP management did not wish to comment on this process.
Cotopaxi is likewise looking to monitor deadstock digitally, both to optimise the process and to certify its provenance. It is working with Queen of Raw, an organisation based in New York, that manages excess inventory for brands, to develop such a system. “Making the process more automatic will unlock more deadstock use globally,” says Ms McKenna. If data on the quantities of unused fabric bolts are readily available, a production run could then be launched at the press of a button, she says. Ralph Lauren and Shein are two companies using Queen of Raw’s MateriaMX, an excess inventory management software programme.
Upcycling for good
Mapping deadstock will help shed light on waste generated by cutting and sewing, but solutions also need to be found for unsold garments stocked in factories and warehouses around the world. The logistics of redesigning, deconstructing and remanufacturing these goods present an entirely different challenge. A set of skills that large garment-manufacturing operations may find difficult to deploy. It can, however, be handled by the resourcefulness of smaller facilities that are fully dedicated to reducing waste.
In Mexico City, French fashion industry veteran Pierre Violet has initiated such a system and is working with Decathlon to help the French sports retailer reduce its stocks of unsold or unsellable garments. Through his company, CRÖM-D, he says he “seeks to fix a broken fashion system by upcycling what has already been manufactured”. But he also seeks to draw attention to the anonymous and unacknowledged people that make the garments, who are mainly women, and who toil away in unforgiving tasks in apparel factories around the world.
Working with a cut-and-sew workshop in Mexico City, and Decathlon’s local teams, he has set up a collaborative upcycling process to already made new goods from the retailer’s unsold or defective stock. “We propose various redesigned options to Decathlon’s local buying team, which they validate or not,” Mr Violet tells WSA. “It is a true co-creative undertaking as the buyers tell us which product categories are lacking in their inventory. If Decathlon needs cycling shorts, we will design cycling shorts out of the stock we are given.” It is, he concedes, a challenge to manufacture the products needed from those that cannot be sold. “In all cases, we must make items that offer the performances that Decathlon requires and its consumers demand.” Smart solutions thus need to be found for each production run. In one case, the fabric from a series of UV-blocking tops unfit for sale was used to make the shoulder yoke and collars of running tops. This fabric was not breathable enough for the body of the shirt but useful in protecting the wearer from the sun. In another case, a polyester T-shirt was recut and pleated to make a tennis skirt.
The quality of the retailer’s fabrics makes it possible to rework them into high-quality and high-performing clothes, says Mr Violet. “In some cases, we can reuse up to 80% of a deficient product. We can also dip into fabric offcuts that are sent to the atelier. These are usually very small scraps, but they can come in handy.” After a first small run to market-test the concept, a series of 500 remade pieces labelled Decathlon x CRÖM-D was put on sale this summer.
“We need to use the materials that are laying around in defective apparel, more so than bolts of deadstock fabric,” says Mr Violet. He also points out that whether transforming unused fabrics or remanufacturing unsold garments, “we are making new products from new fabrics”.
Located in the suburbs of Paris, LeLab+ specialises in upcycling unsold goods, supporting brands and retailers seeking to produce in France, and includes a manufacturing workshop. Founded by Myriam Mentfakh, who has 24 years’ experience working in fashion, it was chosen by US sportswear brand Nike for the Parisian run of its Re-Creation platform. This concept, first launched in 2022 in Los Angeles, before coming to London and Paris this year, calls on a local designer and manufacturing facility to remake unsold items.
“To be able to work with Nike, we needed to pass its stringent supplier-onboarding protocols, which included two on-site audits and training for sewers and staff. Now we are a Nike-certified facility,” Ms Mentfakh says proudly. The Itzapala atelier working for Decathlon in Mexico went through a similar vetting process. “There were a total of 128 requirements to satisfy, including special security and safety measures for a workshop located in a region prone to earthquakes. Decathlon staff came to check the facility three times,” says Mr Violet.
Not only experimental
LeLab+ has had several experiences in upcycling. For a major hypermarket chain in France, it remade a range of sleepwear from unsold bedding. But that, says Ms Mentfakh, was a one-shot operation and she sees more promise in Nike’s Re-Creation programme, which she says is ongoing. The AGEC law that bans the destruction of unsold non-food goods will presumably boost her upcycling and remanufacturing activities. “Our challenge is to make this new legal framework economically viable,” she says, adding that it requires specific technical expertise.
She sees a parallel between apparel brands’ attitudes towards upcycling unsold stock and the selling of second-hand goods. “At first brands did not think it would be a good solution, but now they have for the most part set up take-back programmes and created recommerce platforms offering pre-loved clothes,” she says. The second-hand market she adds relies on specific expertise and logistics, as items need to be cleaned and sometimes repaired, before being put back for sale.
Confirming her point, remanufacturing practices are growing among established players. German sportswear brand Vaude has turned a pilot project launched in 2016 with refugees into a permanent upcycling workshop at its headquarters in Baden-Württenberg, where remnants from backpack and bike bag productions are reworked into tote bags. Patagonia stores in the US feature similar items, such as computer cases, made from leftover fabrics. VF-owned outdoor brand The North Face reworks garments unfit for sale in its Remade programme. On a more or less regular basis, it releases short runs of 50 or so items, most recently of Nuptse puff jackets.
Having successfully set up a remanufacturing system with a global player such as Decathlon, Mr Violet at CRÖM-D envisions reproducing this model with other garment-making facilities in Mexico. “These ateliers have the expertise, but they don’t have access to the big customers,” he says. “This is the only way to have a positive impact on the lives of the workers and help make fashion have a positive social impact on the world.”
CRÖM-D’s initiative also plays a part in the French retailer’s zero-waste strategy. Addressing systemic overproduction is not only good for a company’s ESG reporting, it can also positively impact its financial ratings. Tallied in the filings of public companies, excess inventory affects both their bottom lines and share prices. It is a rare event when a brand turns surplus stock into revenue as adidas has managed to do with Yeezy sneakers that it removed from the market because of their association with rapper Kanye West. Liquidating these ranges, which the company said were worth $1.3 billion, brought in €400 million in sales in its second quarter of 2023. They are not, admittedly, remade in any way, but they do reveal the scope of overproduction and the possible scale of a market for remanufactured or upcycled goods.
Cotopaxi’s Repurposed Teca and Del Dia ranges put 1.6 million metres of deadstock fabric to new use in 2022.
Credit: Cotopaxi
