We’re delighted to have announced MMC’s investment in Unmade, together with our friends at Octopus Ventures and Felix Capital.

I wanted to write about our motivation for investing, and why the problem they address is so urgent.

Our dirty little fashion secret

Fashion is one of the UK’s world-leading industries, with the apparel market worth $65 billion and employing millions of people. But the UK is also a centre for the huge waste problem blighting how we shop and dress.

Over 80% of manufactured clothing ultimately ends up in landfill, whether worn by a consumer or not. Much of what is made is never sold or used, because of overproduction and wasteful distribution. Swedish retail giant H&M said last year that it was sitting on $4.3 billion of unsold clothing, while British luxury fashion house Burberry admitted burning £30m of perfectly usable stock the previous year in order to protect its brand.

Globally, the Ellen MacArthur Foundation estimates that the fashion industry loses over $400 billion a year in unsold stock and waste, representing 15% of all products.

Here in London, textiles are the fastest-growing contributor to our landfill problem. But we also export our problem around the world, shipping millions of tons of waste to poorer parts of the world.

As those economies develop, they are pushing back. Countries such as China and Malaysia are banning or reducing the import of plastics and other materials headed for recycling processors, causing a headache for EU countries who ship the majority of collected recyclables abroad for processing.

It’s clear that we’re going to have to tackle the problem properly — at source.

Built for scale — but that’s the problem

The fashion supply chain is set up to mass produce standard designs in big production runs. This mostly relies on forecasting consumer demand 6-12 months in advance, trying to predict which designs, colours and sizes will sell in what volumes and where. Since these predictions are always wrong, brands and retailers figure it’s better to overproduce (risking wastage) rather than underproduce (risking sales revenue).

Fast fashion makes this worse. Seasonal trends pass quickly, and clothing is increasingly considered disposable. Again, the UK is one of the worst offenders — we buy more clothes per person than any other country in Europe.

The industry is slowly waking up to the problem, with prominent figures such as iconic designer Jean Paul Gaultier hitting out at the overproduction of clothes by the industry and describing the destruction of stock as “scandalous”.

A more sustainable approach

Unmade was founded by Hal Watts, Kirsty Emery-Laws and Ben Alun-Jones in 2014 with the ambition to reimagine both the design and manufacturing processes of fashion. They saw a way to organise the industry differently, with brands only making what is sold, and distribution much more responsive to demand.

The Unmade software platform enables clothing brands to create on-demand supply chains. Clothing can be customised using Unmade’s interface, then sent to a factory where Unmade’s Order Management System (OMS) fits it into a production run and takes over control of the actual manufacturing. Unmade’s tech overrides the clunky 1980s control systems that run all the industry-standard knitting, embroidery and printing machines, getting any old factory up and running with a complete end-to-end digital workflow.

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How does this reduce waste? By enabling on-demand production of customised items with lead times of less than a week, brands’ merchandising and store teams can use Unmade to stock the right stores and warehouses with the right designs and sizes at the right time, responding to real consumer buying behaviour — no more guessing needed.

With a personal touch

Brave brands can go one step further, and put the same tools in consumers’ hands.

Consumers can customise their designs — and maybe do better than the brands themselves.