Dead Stock - A Dead End Solution?
In a perfect world dead stock would not be a thing. How we manage to continue to increase the amount of fabric and trims we make and still end up with deadstock baffles me. In the wonderful age of social media we have the capabilities to collect data from consumers and draw conclusions about their buying habits to a highly accurate degree. However, we still rely on historical data, plus a bit of wishful thinking in terms of growth percentages, to make our buying decisions. Add in the race to the bottom on price, which often means businesses over buy in order to reduce surcharges and spread the load over sales periods, means that we have an increasing amount of dead stock, or product that will never be sold.
Now not all dead stock is bad, in some instances it does serve a purpose. Small brands are able to keep their cashflow lean, students have access to a wide range of fabrics that increase their education around how fabrics react in 3D form and the best manufacturing techniques. Remnant sellers are able to make a living selling to hobbyists and crafts people, generating income for people who may otherwise not have some. Clothes made from good quality dead stock can often out live what it was designed for before it became dead stock. But ultimately using dead stock can’t be considered a sustainable alternative.
One of the first instances of a UK brand utilising dead stock to create a name for themselves was a company called Shite Shirts, quick look on Google and they do still exist! And despite only using dead stock fabric and trims since their inception in 2003, they have never marketed themselves as sustainable. Yet today a brand only needs to be using dead stock fabric to be listed in one of the many “10 most sustainable…” articles. Another new dead stock trend that’s appeared in the last couple of years is brands taking dead stock apparel and making them into something new. Now I’m all for buying product from a manufacturer where the buyer hasn’t been able to complete their order and reselling it either in the form that it was made, or updating that with a graphic or a print. You aren’t generating anything new, you’re not increasing the amount of waste and you are supporting a business in, most likely, a country with cheaper labour who isn’t able to access support when buyers either cancel the orders or go into administration.
www.shiteshirts.com
The big problem arises when a brand buys dead stock products and then turns them into something completely new and charges a premium for being sustainable. For example, there is a lingerie brand that buys dead stock t’shirts from a manufacturer and makes them into pants and crop tops through another sampling house (they use a sampling house because their dead stock is sourced in Bangladesh and the minimums there are high). These aren’t recycled products, these are new garments that have never seen an end consumer. Typically a standard t’shirt wastes about 15% of fabric when it’s cut, when you then cut that garment up again to make something new, it creates even more waste. At best it’s doubling the waste, due to something already being cut and sewn you’re limited with how much you can get out of it. Additional waste won’t be taken into consideration either, such as sewing threads and care labels etc, of which they probably won’t know the composition of and therefore will be relegated to the rubbish bin. Even if they claim they are recycling this waste; there is currently no fibre to fibre recycling anywhere in the world (this is terms of keeping the quality the same, there are options for recycling some fibres by turning them into mulch and re-spinning, however the quality isn’t achieved for apparel during this process as yet). Either way the waste is high.
The next problem it brings up is around supply chain transparency. The brand is completely absolved of any illegal labour practices around the manufacture of the dead stock. This in turn increases the likelyhood that supply chain violations will remain unchallenged. If other brands won’t work with a supplier because they violate these laws then it can be cheaper to continue making “dead stock” for other brands to take to “recycle” them, especially if the demand grows. Now I know you must be thinking; ‘what a cynical person!’, and as I’m British I’d say you were quite right! However, we are seeing this exact instance for recycled polyesters. It is an open secret that its sometimes more profitable to keep a plastic bottle company running all year round and selling what they can’t sell to resin / yarn suppliers to turn into recycled polyesters than it is to only make the amount that’s been ordered (this is also known as pre consumer waste). Using dead stocks absolves a brand from having a fully transparent supply chain. In the same way that we only track carbon emissions on the initial product and not any subsequent products. So a recycled polyester will have a lower carbon footprint because they don’t take into account the carbon footprint of the plastic bottle it was in a previous life. Not a problem if it’s been used in the way it’s intended, but when it’s pre consumer then we should be made aware of it’s environmental impact and it shouldn’t absolve brands from not having complete transparency from the initial fibre creation stage.
There will always be instances where dead stock will make a benefit somewhere, but if a brand calls itself sustainable because they use dead stock, it’s time to think critically. Are they solving a problem, or are they profiting off it?
