When a fashion or furniture designer buys fabrics to make a new design, they’ll often get more than they really need. Textile mills have better availability (and cheaper prices) for bulk buyers, and many designers would rather have too much fabric than too little.
It’s a compelling economy of scale – but there’s a colossal environmental cost, as truckloads of unused fabric are sent to landfill as ‘dead stock’. An estimated £92bn worth of material is currently sitting in warehouses around the world, at risk of wastage.
Fashion designer, Deborah Lyons had a well-stocked warehouse of her own, holding more than enough materials to supply her own small business, Maison Lyons. Sensing an opportunity to turn the risk of waste into an eco-friendly initiative for good, Deborah teamed up with a handful of like-minded fashion professionals to found Last Yarn, a pioneering fabric marketplace, dedicated to surplus fabrics.
“Overconsumption is part of the very nature of fashion – it has been since we got into the idea of producing collections and filling stores,” Deborah told Ernest Wright.
“If you order too little fabric, you’ll be faced with surcharges – or the mill just won’t do it. And when you make a garment, you need to order at least 10% more than you think you need, in case of issues such as damage to the fabric,” she explains.
A vast majority of designers overbuy fabric, from smaller businesses like Deborah’s own label to the very biggest fashion houses. Last Yarn has a bold yet simple plan to bring all that dead stock back to life on designers’ worktables.
Salvaged in style
Here’s how it works. Last Yarn runs an online marketplace – a bit like Depop or eBay – where designers can list unused fabric for sale. Other designers buy the fabric at below-market volumes. It’s a win-win-win for buyer, seller and planet.
“Setting up the marketplace system, making it look cool and getting it to do what we want has been a real patchwork of tasks, but we’re starting to do some exciting things,” says Deborah.
“We’re making really high-quality fabrics available to designers like myself, who would usually have to place an order for several hundred metres just to get the same thing and then waste some of it as dead stock.”
The Last Yarn marketplace has become a treasure trove of brand-new surplus fabrics – cottons, silks, linens, jacquards, brocades… It’s sobering to think that much of this stock would once have gone to waste, and much like it still does.
A vision in green
Last Yarn is a young initiative run by a lean workforce – but its sustainable approach to fabric is starting to trend among fashion designers great and small.
“Bigger brands have tended to work with us as sellers, but we’re starting to see them become buyers, too,” says Deborah.
“We also sell to niche labels that are quite mindful of how they want to produce, and people who are making accessories or smaller products and just need a certain amount of really nice silk, for example.
“Last Yarn makes it easier for them to source sustainably – they only need to buy by the metre, so they don’t need to overbuy.”
Only UK buyers can access Last Yarn at present, but plans are afoot to serve other territories in Europe and elsewhere with their own marketplaces.
Deborah and her team are also working on a digital 3D swatching project in partnership with Browzware, a US tech company specialising in fashion applications.
“It will give people the opportunity to work with our fabrics within design software, so prospective buyers can visualise Last Yarn fabrics within their design software,” she says.
The future and the solution
Over 200,000 metres of fabric have already been saved from going to landfill, thanks to Last Yarn. It’s a mammoth contribution to sustainability in the fashion industry – but ultimately, Deborah believes the solutions to today’s wasteful practices will arrive with the next generation of designers.
“At schools and colleges right now, it seems that sustainability is intuitive to many of the kids,” she says.
“They’re arriving with a sustainability focused attitude, and that’s what they’re expecting from the system. I see a lot of positivity there – we just need to give these young people a platform.”
To that end, Last Yarn offers mentorship and support to environmentally-minded young designers via its educational arm, Last Yarn Academy.
The organisation has partnered annually with educational institutions – Central St. Martin’s in 2022, Middlesex College in 2023, and this year, with Jimmy Choo Academy.
“We really like working with young people, because generally we see them as the future and the solution to everything that we’ve done wrong,” says Deborah.
“The Jimmy Choo Academy partnership has been a little more in-depth: we’ve been running panel discussions around sustainability, we’re sponsoring three of their graduates with fabrics for their final projects, and Ernest Wright has given them scissors to cut their materials.”
Meanwhile, Last Yarn has done Ernest Wright a very good deed in return, by sending us various pieces of surplus fabric to try cutting with our scissors and shears, so that we can do thorough testing using the same materials our customers need to cut.
Despite Last Yarn’s encouraging achievements, and despite all the promise of future generations, the fashion industry’s sustainability problem hasn’t gone away just yet. Ask any climate scientist: there remains an urgent need to tip the scales in favour of sustainable manufacturing and consumption.
“We’ve got to deal with the waste we have, which is not really waste – it’s a valuable resource that a brand is no longer going to use.” says Deborah.
“Now is the time to rethink our approach in a bigger way.”
To find out more, visit Last Yarn.
