Deadstock

Just last week I attended a live (over Zoom, of course) webinar called “Building a Sustainable Strategy” put on by Vogue Business. The session was led by three speakers: Gregorio Ossola, Vogue Business insights lead; Professor Dilys Williams FRSA, director of the Centre for Sustainable Fashion; and Michael Beutler, sustainability operations director at Kering.

I took many, many notes and I have lots of things that I could write about; but for now, I want to focus on one thing – overproduction. The speakers talked a good bit about how overproduction is a major issue within the fashion industry. While Beutler made sure to note that this is not a valid or verified scientific data point, it is something like for every 2 garments created, 1 garment is actually sold. As stated by Sarah Shannon (2020), “the scale of the problem is huge. Bernstein luxury analyst Luca Solca estimates a ‘best-case scenario’ is that luxury brands will be left with end-of-season unsold inventory worth 10-to-13 percent of full-prices sales” (para. 6). So, what’s to be done with all this excess inventory? Well, recently I’ve been reading many articles that discuss selling deadstock as a potential solution to the fashion industry’s waste problem.

Deadstock is basically the “massive amounts of excess fabric sitting in factories and unsold merchandise sent to a landfill or burned” (Cernansky, 2020, para. 1). As stated by Rachel Cernansky (2020) in a recent Vogue Business article:

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. 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. (para. 4)

SupplyCompass, a sustainable production software company, is partnering up with online marketplace Queen of Raw, to launch a library of deadstock fabrics from which brands can browse and purchase (para. 2). According to its reports, this partnership is already quite successful (2020):

SupplyCompass says in the last three months, 90 per cent of the brands reaching out to the company for the first time asked about deadstock; in the six months prior, that figure was 35 per cent. Queen of Raw has seen an 80 per cent spike in the number of transactions since the onset of the pandemic. (para. 3)

An image of SupplyCompass’ collaboration with Queen of Raw.

While the use of deadstock appears to be a useful immediate step towards sustainable production, it doesn’t really address the key problem: overproduction. In fact, some critics worry that rising use and popularity of deadstock will actually increase the overall demand, exacerbating the overproduction problem even further – “brands and suppliers will capitalize on the marketing value of [deadstock] without adapting their processes to prevent waste” (para. 13).

I, however, think there is an even larger problem that umbrellas over overproduction: overstimulation. Professor Williams brought up this point in the Vogue Business webinar. It is absolutely essential to address the problem of overproduction, but we must first address the fact that we have an overstimulated marketplace. If consumers and buyers demand more-and-more from designers, then unsurprisingly the designers do all that they can to produce in order to fulfill that demand. I touched on this idea in one of my previous blog posts, “Settle In.” Overproduction is encouraged by a marketplace that demands a never-ending supply of goods.

An image representing the overproduction and waste from the fashion industry.

All in all, I think that the use of deadstock is most definitely a step in the right direction. Putting unused or unsold materials to use is surely better than throwing them in a landfill or incinerating them. But ultimately, I lean on the side of the critics… the industry, and our entire capitalistic society for that matter, must address the greater problems of overstimulation and overproduction in order to take substantial steps towards sustainability.

Alright, off the soapbox I go.

Bye for now,

McGee