The business of fashion is much bigger than clothes
& that’s also where the money’s at.
Naturally, fashion’s traditional conversation anchor has been weighted by the people designing and creating clothes.
But I personally am increasingly convinced some of the most valuable companies in fashions next chapter will barely touch the hanger - they’ll be working out what happens before, underneath and after what we wear.
Developing the material, tracking the product, getting it back, authenticating it, repairing it, reselling it, sorting it, recycling it, or working out what on earth to do with it when nobody wants it anymore.
Fashion’s sustainability transition is innovation way beyond clothing design.
Fashion’s infrastructure layer
At Irigai, a lot our time revolves looking at emerging fashion businesses, and increasingly we see a market full of innovation,
Resale platforms have turned old wardrobes into inventory. Repair businesses are trying to make fixing clothes as easy as buying them. Digital Product Passport companies are building the data layer that will follow garments through their lives. Reverse logistics businesses are figuring out how products actually make the journey backwards. Sortation and recycling companies are tackling the frankly enormous problem of what happens when they do.
Then there are material developers sitting even further upstream, trying to change what clothes are made from before they exist at all.
These businesses are becoming a vital part of how fashion works, and the commercial conditions around them are changing quickly.
European regulation is putting greater responsibility for products and waste onto businesses. Digital Product Passports are coming into the picture. Resale has moved from the outskirts of fashion into the strategies of some of its biggest companies. Repair, take-back and recycling increasingly need actual systems behind the nice circular arrows on impact reports.
Someone has to make circularity work
As a sustainable fashion industry, we talk about circular fashion a lot - abstractly, its opportunities, its complications, its funding winners.
Actually doing any of this at meaningful scale involves an enormous amount of deeply unsexy infrastructure.
A garment needs to be identified, collected, transported, assessed, sorted, cleaned, repaired or dismantled, resold, redistributed or recycled. Someone needs the data. Someone needs the machinery. Someone needs to know where it goes next.
And preferably the economics need to work at the end of it.
This is why some of sustainable fashion’s biggest commercial opportunities might sit in businesses most consumers will never know exist.
Fashion can launch as many take-back schemes as it likes. Someone still has to deal with the take-back.
There’s a communication problem hiding in all of this
We’ve got a mismatch on our hands. That’s what Irigai’s for.
Some of the most technically interesting companies entering fashion have some of the least fashion-literate communication.
It makes total sense. A recycling technology might have been developed by material scientists, a traceability platform may be led by engineers, a biomaterial company can spend years focused on proving performance before anyone seriously thinks about how people’s attention span can digest it.
Fashion is a particularly unforgiving industry for this because technical capability is only part of the sale. The product also has to enter a world obsessed with application, aesthetics, margins, speed, differentiation, customer behaviour and desirability.
The industry needs to think about its communications in terms of its end-user:
A brand doesn’t adopt a new material because the science is interesting.
A retailer doesn’t introduce repair because circularity sounds nice.
A consumer doesn’t use a resale system because the reverse-logistics architecture is impressive.
Somewhere between the technology and adoption, somebody has to translate what the thing actually does for the person on the other side.
The backend is becoming the brand
I think this gets more important as these categories become increasingly crowded. I speak to founders on this week in week out, and there’s space. The opportunity is in radical differentiation.
In all honesty, a lot of businesses are looking and sounding the same.
There are already multiple businesses offering Digital Product Passport infrastructure. Multiple textile recyclers trying to secure feedstock and brand partnerships. Multiple biomaterial companies competing to become commercially viable. Multiple resale and repair solutions pitching brands that are simultaneously being approached by everybody else.
Being technically capable doesn’t automatically make a company the obvious choice.
These are the questions that need to be asked:
Why this system?
Why this material?
Why should a fashion brand care now?
Where does it fit into what already exists?
Will customers actually use it?
Can it scale?
Does it make commercial sense?
And, slightly less politely: can you explain it without making everybody’s eyes glaze over?
This is where infrastructure companies start needing many of the same things fashion brands have always needed: positioning, relevance, recognition and a reason to choose them.
They might be B2B. They might never appear on a shop floor. They still have a brand.
PS. Sustainable fashion brands can sense-check their branding with Irigai’s free Clarity Check tool.
The really interesting businesses will understand both sides
The winners here won’t necessarily be the companies with the glossiest marketing.
The danger would be taking complicated infrastructure and simply wrapping it in fashion language until it sounds sexy. We have had quite enough of that.
It’s about technical credibility and cultural fluency at the same time.
Understanding the engineer and the buyer. Looping in the sustainability team and the creative director.
A brilliant repair system nobody can be bothered to use is still a bad repair system. A technically superior biomaterial that brands can’t understand how to apply will struggle to leave the sample room. A Digital Product Passport that satisfies regulation but gives the customer absolutely nothing worth scanning is a missed opportunity.
The technology matters enormously, but so does everything around it that makes people say yes.
A successful phase of sustainable fashion requires businesses that connects innovation to people who can leverage it.
The next enormous fashion business could be a sorting technology. A material platform. A resale operating system. A repair network. A recycler. A piece of infrastructure we don’t have particularly glamorous language for yet.
Fashion’s sustainability transition will probably be won by some very unfashionable-sounding businesses.
One of the jobs is making sure they don’t look that way to the market.
Enter Irigai.
Our Sustainable Fashion Clarity Check is a free tool for businesses and founders to use to get a handle on how they communicate - relevant for sustainable fashion brands, circularity pioneers, biomaterials developers and anyone moving the fashion industry forward.
