Deadstock - What using it looks like and why we still love it

Deadstock is the excess, new fabric from the fashion industry that otherwise gets thrown away.  It results from companies deciding to no longer produce a certain style, or from the slightest mistakes in the milling process. There are 14 million pounds (5.1 bn pounds per year) of this deadstock fabric created every day, so there’s no shortage in quantity to use.   Deadstock ranges in size from 6x6 inch scraps to 20-50 yard rolls. We use rolls to create our pieces, and recently we’ve even been using the scraps generated from our production to avoid any fabric waste. 

So. . .  why doesn’t everyone use deadstock?

The difficulty of using deadstock is that it’s kind of as if you were going to a grocery store and had no idea how many cans of chicken noodle soup (if any) they’ll have in stock and if they will ever restock them.  Imagine you fell in love with a particular chicken noodle soup but you had no idea whether you would ever be able to eat it again. A bit of an odd analogy, but it’s very similar to working with deadstock. We may adore a canvas orange and buy all of the yards we can, but we can’t guarantee how much or if we will be able to use it in future lines because we are not the ones producing it. Because of this, you have to be creative and determined - piecing together bits and loving that every piece we create might be slightly different from the next. It also forces us to be slow fashion because it takes us some time to source enough of all of our fabrics. 

It’d be easier to start creating our own recycled or organic fabrics, but for now, we really believe that there’s nothing more environmentally friendly than using fabrics that already exist. It avoids both the emissions and water pollution from creating fabric, and the waste associated with throwing it away. In a time where the United Nations IPCC climate report just said that 1.5 degrees of warming is all but inevitable, we think that there’s no room to create a brand that doesn’t do everything it can for the planet.