Co-designing greener fashion with Unfolded

The fashion industry is a low profile climate conundrum. While all the attention goes on big ticket carbon problems like power stations and cars, the clothing industry has a big enough carbon footprint to derail the world’s climate targets all by itself. A commonly cited figure is 8-10% of global emissions, once you add up the impacts of growing cotton, producing fabric, manufacturing, consumer use and laundry, through to final disposal.

One of the mad things about this situation is that the fashion industry has a huge amount of waste built in. In rich countries, people buy more clothes than they need and throw them away. The retail brands also throw a lot away. Fast fashion is all about novelty, and the whole business model depends on churning out new items fast and keeping a rapid turnover in the shops.

That means that a lot of clothes get thrown away without so much as going on sale. Brands don’t publish accounts of their waste and so we don’t know for sure, but it has been estimated that between 15 and 45 billion items of unsold clothing are thrown away every year. Much of this is made of plastic and will not biodegrade.

Why such vast quantities of waste? Because fast fashion is all about placing bets on what consumers want. Some brands have new ranges in stores every two weeks, encouraging customers to check in and see what’s new. If something captures the public’s imagination or is worn by a celebrity, you’ll have a hit on your hands and you don’t want to sell out. So you make plenty, and the cost of production is so low – thanks in part to sweatshop labour – that it’s still profitable if you end up dumping stock.

It doesn’t have to be that way, and Unfolded are a start-up that is trying an entirely different approach. Rather than anticipating what their customers might want, they co-design their products with them. They take suggestions and requests from a community of over 7,000 women. Their designers come up with ideas, patterns and fabrics, and the community votes on the ones they like best. Out of this process comes a new range every two to three months.

By co-designing the products, Unfolded don’t have to second-guess what people want. They don’t have to guess at how much to make either, because people pre-order. Production only starts when enough people have placed an order, so there’s no wasted stock.

There are other benefits to this transparent and relational approach. One is that Unfolded don’t need to price in all that stock that won’t sell, and pass that price on to the customer, and so they can sell at lower prices. They can also pay fair wages to the people that make the clothes.

Unfolded was founded in Scotland in 2021demonstrate that things could be done differently. They don’t sell clothes for the likes of me, but have a look and see if it’s a business you could support.

• Five things you can do to reduce your fashion footprint
• Header image by Karina Tess