Waste is the problem we are trying to solve.
We live in a world of waste. A world where football stadiums’ worth of perfectly good food is thrown away while people starve to death. A world where never-worn bags and clothes are taken from stores to be burnt — while the homeless shiver in the cold, and the poor must go about shamefully dressed in rags.
Waste is not just an accounting problem, its a moral problem. It is a moral problem because it violates the fundamental notion that everything is created for a valuable purpose. It is a moral problem because it has a human cost, and and environmental cost.
Unsold inventory that gets destroyed represents value in the form of money that is simply thrown away. Every item not sold is a waste of materials that were purchased. That is money that could have been saved, or redeployed for other purposes. That money could have been used to pay higher wages to the people who produced it, or simply given away to feed the hungry, or pay someone struggling to meet their bills.
Worst still, it is a waste of human potential. All that skill, effort and working hours spent in making the goods that never get used could have been used for other things. Spending more time building meaningful relationships, learning new things, helping other people in need. Suppose it took just 132 man hours per person per year along the entire value chain that it took to produce and destroy unsold products. That’s 3 full 44-hour work weeks where everyone could have just not showed up, and done something else instead.
But as if the human costs weren’t already sufficiently great, waste also has a terrible environmental cost. To be clear, there’s nothing wrong in using the resources from this earth to better human lives. But waste is simply wanton destruction. Landfills dug for nothing. Forests cleared for nothing. Fields and crops and water and minerals dredged and cultivated and harvested for nothing. Precious energy sources spent for absolutely zero net increase in human happiness.
The world does not need another fashion label. No. The world needs solutions to waste. All around the world, people are working on solutions to different forms of waste. Food and plastic waste are prominent areas of attention already. But the fashion industry is perhaps one of the oldest, and yet the slowest to innovate among industries in waste reduction. As we stand on the cusp of a new technological revolution, we have the possibility of using technology once again to make our world a better one for the people in it.
Our solution to waste is not merely mitigating the downstream impacts of unsold inventory, or discarded products. Having eco-friendly or recyclable materials doesn’t address the human cost of waste — in terms of time, talent and money that was spent for nothing. Creating secondary marketplaces for liquidating unsold inventory at discounted prices, or worse, dumping in less developed countries only serves to paint brands in a bad light. These solutions assume that waste is inevitable.
Our solution to waste must prevent waste from even happening in the first place. Waste occurs because we have a just-in-case approach to matching demand and supply. The industry currently tries to predict what will be in demand, and how much demand there will be, and then produces that amount of inventory in the hopes of getting it right. The results to date speak for themselves. Our solution must adopt a just-in-time approach to matching demand and supply. We must produce only to meet actual demand, of an order from a paying customer. Not only does this de-risk the creative process from a financial viewpoint, but it also prevents the human and ecological cost of waste from ever happening.
I think that an on-demand supply chain (supply-side) that supports a mass customization platform (demand-side) is the answer to our world of waste.
The print-on-demand model like Threadless and Society6 is a partial example of that solution. None of the millions of products you see stocked on the site actually exist as physical stock. They are all stored as digital representations, codified instructions for machines to make them. The only inventory that is held in stock are the blank raw materials (resin, fabric, zippers, hardware) that can be turned into any number of products (phone cases, bags, laptop sleeves, etc.) when needed. But of course the print-on-demand model is limited because they cannot have significant variations in product design. They may have a million variants but only one tote bag design. This is the final hurdle that our solution must cross.
When 3D product designs for sewn goods can be stored as digital files, they can be made on demand in a just-in-time production facility. It will open the possibility of having a million variants in color, multiplied by a million different tote bag designs. And all of this creative possibility is enabled, and consumer choice is afforded with entirely zero waste. Product designers can create and test the reception towards new collections and designs freely without the burden of having to ensure that sales can cover MOQs, and consumers can create something that is just right for them, or as gifts. Over time, this interaction generates significant volumes of data that will refine our ability to match demand and supply precisely. We will gain the ability to predict what styles and colors sell well with what groups of people over time — without having to actually incur waste in the process of testing our assumptions.
Is this concept competing with the idea of crowdfunding? After all, crowdfunding also reduces waste since only one pre-production prototype is made and marketed, before a larger volume is produced. Not at all. One major limitation with crowdfunding models today is that they don’t capture the “long tail” of demand curves.
See, the idea behind the long tail theory is that trying to sell only the bestsellers, may miss out on the opportunity from combining the many small pockets of niche products that don’t sell a lot individually, but in aggregate represent a tremendous volume of missed sales opportunities. Additionally, some research suggests that those lower-volume, higher margin niches are a way to upsell people who want to explore beyond the popular brands. Buyers of custom handbags from indie ateliers probably also have the big name luxury stuff too. Crowdfunding tries to find the best winners, but misses out on those niches. Because our solution can accommodate listing a large number niche products for sale without incurring unsold inventory risk, we can capture both the mass market and the niches that add up to a sizable market.
The solution I am proposing does not depend on consumers caring about waste. In fact, most people either don’t have a reason to care, or don’t have the means to make a difference even if they did. But we are not a social enterprise, nor do we have to be. The beauty of free markets is that people’s pursuit their own self-interest can be harnessed to align with a greater good.
From a B2C perspective, a mass customization platform gives consumers greater personalization possibilities to match their wardrobes and their styles. Mass customization also means the possibility of offering more exclusivity for those who care about it. Premium tier-only options, in-store exclusives of premium materials and marquage art. These benefits may well be worth trying the customization process and having to wait for an order to arrive, rather than picking something off the rack.
Even as a B2B2C model, our platform can be used add value to existing brands and upcoming ones: from allowing current sewn goods brands to add a customization option to their existing product line, visual artists looking to create a new revenue stream to monetize their artistic style, indie sewn goods makers looking to scale their business, or even KOLs looking to sell merch to their fan base — without the hassle of having to figure out their own product design, manufacturing and fulfillment. All this can be achieved with application programming interfaces (APIs) that allow integration with third-party sales channels. None of this depends on people caring about waste reduction. But it gives them a reason to consume in a way that is less wasteful, whether they know it or not.
The solution I am proposing is a radical one. It is a big, hairy, audacious goal. But it is the direction towards which the world is heading. Suppl-side innovations like 3D printing, 3D knitting, additive manufacturing are coming together in an age where everyone has a smart device through which they can build and order. Just-in-time models are now technically, and financially viable business models for the first time in human history.
How we get from 0–1, to eventually build that vision of a better world is going to be challenging and exciting. But having that vision of a better world is going to give us the sense of meaning and existential purpose to get there. When the going gets tough as it will, it will be the northern star to remind us why we started, and where we’re headed. There are many ways to make money. Investment banking, commercial litigation, quantitative finance, and machine learning are all careers that can do that. But this vision of matching demand and supply without the tremendous human and ecological costs of waste, will remind us that our journey is not merely a financial one, but a moral one. One in which we are pioneers in a changing world. A world with greater choice, but lesser waste.
That’s what this world needs.
