Fashion companies face
the constant challenge of having to guess which and how many garments they
will sell months before they are available for consumers to buy. The
speculative nature of the supply chain has led to rampant overproduction
and waste, further compounded in recent years by the explosive growth of
fast-fashion. But what’s the alternative? One solution is to take the
guesswork out of fashion by only producing the garments customers have
already chosen.

On 30 May, at 9am UK time, London-based brand Paynter launched its
newest jacket design on its website. Within 86 seconds, all 197 were sold
out. For any company to sell out a product, especially so quickly, is
indeed a mark of success. But for Paynter, it is expected. In fact, it is
an integral part of its made-to-order business model. The brand launches
three products each year in batches of 300 (logistical issues related to
Covid-19 meant fewer this time around) and only begins manufacturing once
customers have placed an order. The brand has a growing waiting list of
more than 3,000 – hence the fast sell-outs.

Paynter’s made-to-order model is an example of many new and
exciting solutions the fashion industry has been inundated with in recent
years to tackle its enormous and growing environmental footprint. But an
essential aspect setting it apart from others is that the made-to-order model – an
old way of producing garments revitalised in recent years with the advent of new
technologies and heightened sustainability concerns – directly tackles
fashion’s problem of overproduction.

Carbon offsetting, biodegradable fabrics, dissolvable threads – they are
all important in their own right, but in the broader context of things,
they are small solutions to a much greater problem, like fixing leaking
pipes in a burning building. What the industry’s sustainability issue
fundamentally boils down to is simple: it is producing too much
clothing.

Avoiding waste with thoughtful products

Launched in 2019 by Becky Okell and Huw Thomas, Paynter works for months
on perfecting each of its products before they go live – designing, sampling,
wear testing, tweaking. Once a product is dropped and every garment is sold,
production begins and within six to eight weeks the customers receive their
jackets, each hand-numbered in the order they were bought. The company has
a low return rate, around 10 jackets for every 300 sold, which are then given
to others on the waiting list. Fabric off-cuts from the making process are
recycled locally into new thread and water used for dying is cleaned and reused
on site.

“When we place an order with our factory, it’s because we have 300 people
who have trusted us to make a jacket for them. And they are forward-thinking,
conscious consumers, happy to wait for a thoughtful product rather than wanting
something to arrive the same day it was purchased,” Okell told FashionUnited.
“As a customer, I think it’s so much more exciting to know that an item of
clothing is being made just for you. Chances are, by the time it arrives with
you, you’ll have an emotional connection to that piece, not just a physical one.”

Overproduction is an issue that has long existed in the industry but one
that has accelerated in recent years with the growth of fast-fashion as more
collections than ever are being churned out and, according to the Ellen
MacArthur Foundation, an estimated garbage truck worth of textiles is being
thrown to the landfill or burned every second. These problems have then been
further exposed in recent months, with the Covid-19 pandemic resulting in
billions of dollars worth of clothing orders with manufacturers being cancelled,
many of which had already been made.

Back to Paynter. Now of course, the brand’s disruptive business model is
niche and couldn’t be applied to the large majority of fashion companies
that need to be more reactive to trends and have faster lead times.
However, the brand is tapping into something the industry has been showing
an increasing appetite for in recent years, and where many believe its
future lies: demand-driven manufacturing.

Harnessing new technologies

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A collaboration last year between London-based fashion tech company
Unmade and New Balance offered a glimpse into how that future might look.
Using Unmade’s software, the US sportswear company launched a feature on
its website allowing shoppers to create their own bespoke sneakers by
customising knitted shoe uppers with a variety of graphics, colours and
text. Unmade’s technology visualisation system creates photographic renders
of the customer’s unique design before it has been made, so shoppers can
see exactly what they’re getting.

Unmade fundamentally wants to pivot the industry towards more agile
production cycles by connecting demand directly to production, providing
brands with software that allows shoppers to engage in the design process
by customising items they buy, within parameters predefined by the brand.
In short, it allows brands to eliminate guesswork and the risk of overstock
by having them manufacture items shoppers have already customised and
bought online, effectively leveraging two of the industry’s key trends:
personalisation and sustainability.

Founder Hal Watts believes many of the large companies currently
struggling in today’s rapidly-changing industry could benefit from this
more nimble approach to manufacturing. “Many of them are well-positioned to
change models as they do in-house product development and they have the
scale and connections to shake things up in their supply chain,” he said.
“For smaller brands, or digital-native brands, they often have less scale
and less manufacturing expertise.”

Unmade usually begins by shifting just a few of a brand’s products from
a traditional manufacturing approach to a demand-driven one (Watts said
he’s seen little appetite by brands to completely disrupt existing supply
chains). The company captures all the design and production data for a
given product and then turns it into an agile product that can be leveraged
via new designs for particular markets within days. “For some brands, we
now manage hundreds of products, enabling them to create entire product
ranges and have them in production and in retail within weeks,” Watts
said.

Perhaps now more than ever, companies will see the value in such a shift.
In recent months, the Covid-19 pandemic has brought pre-existing flaws in
the industry’s supply and demand model hurtling into the spotlight. In
April, it was revealed that Primark had taken a 284 million pound hit from
stock it could no longer sell, while Marks & Spencer in May revealed it
would be “hibernating” around 200 million pounds worth of unsold seasonal
stock until Spring 2021.

While most brands will likely be focusing simply on survival in the
short-term, when the dust settles, they might find themselves in a unique
position to reconsider the long-term viability of their business models.
“Once there is a bit of breathing room, the global pandemic will push
brands to focus on moving to demand-driven approaches,” Watts said. “This
will mean they have less stock and therefore are less exposed to changes in
consumer demand. That’s just common sense in a customer-centric
industry.”

One company that did just that is Candian denim maker Duer. Prior to the
pandemic, the brand, which sells in 26 countries, was experiencing a 100
percent year-on-year growth average for the past five years. But then in
May, as a result of the pandemic, it lost 75 percent of its revenue in less
than a week. So the company launched a “quick response” presale method
called Next by Duer in a bid to line up supply with demand and cut waste.
The model works by introducing a prototype of a product in a three-week
campaign which will only be manufactured if a minimum threshold of orders
is met. If it is met, the product will be made and delivered to the
customer within four to eight weeks.

Demand-driven prototyping

It’s important to note that this model only applies to some products in
the brand’s full range and, if a prototype is popular enough during the
campaign, it can then become a part of Duer’s core product range. But
nonetheless, just by shifting to this new paradigm, the brand expects the
model to help reduce its overall inventory by a minimum of 35
percent.

“Creating speculatory inventory, which everyone does, bringing it into
stores and then spending all this money on marketing and trying to sell it
– it’s completely inefficient,” Duer founder Gary Lenett told
FashionUnited. “We’ve shifted towards seeing where the demand is and then
meeting it. This new way of purchasing not only produces less waste but
will pass production efficiency on to the customer, meaning products are
less expensive.”

Lenett said the company managed to launch the new model, including
backend supply chain process changes and frontend website revisions, within
around nine weeks. The inspiration for the model came from Duer’s roots –
the company was launched through four crowdfunding rounds on Kickstarter.
“That experience taught me just how inefficient the normal way of doing
things can be. With crowdsourcing, you’re not creating demand; people are
telling you whether the demand is there,” Lennett said. “That’s something
that always stuck with me and I knew I wanted to eventually implement it
into our business model.”

So what’s next for fashion manufacturing? Watts thinks it’s very
unlikely we’ll ever see a purely on-demand fashion industry for many
reasons: It would make production scheduling incredibly challenging; people
are always going to want to walk into a shop and try on clothing from off
the rack; wardrobe basics such as white t-shirts will always be popular and
therefore easy to forecast. The list goes on. But perhaps a more realistic
vision is that certain aspects of the industry will shift from traditional
manufacturing approaches to demand-driven ones, such as certain products
in a brand’s range, like New Balance x Unmade sneakers, or prototyping, as
seen with Next by Duer.

And that shift is becoming increasingly viable in a market where
technology is rapidly advancing, consumers are more concerned than ever
about the environmental impact of the industry and personalisation is
fashion’s newest must-have.

Sooner or later, Watts believes companies won’t have much choice but to
integrate these new models. “Brands are dying. The way they operate today
is not financially, socially or environmentally sustainable,” he said. “I
think many of them overestimate the changes needed in their supply chain
and underestimate the benefits of being able to constantly get the right
product to market at the right time.”

Main article photo: Paynter x Greater Goods