Founded in 2015, Unspun has made a splash with its on-demand, custom-fit jeans: scan your body with your phone, and a few weeks later, receive jeans custom-made to fit your exact body. The idea behind this model is that it enables fashion to avoid having to try to predict — often incorrectly — what customers are going to want to buy, which is the dominant approach to apparel manufacturing and one of the main contributors to the industry’s overproduction and inventory waste problem. It’s thought to also cut down on product returns — no more purchasing three sizes of the same product just to see what fits, only to return two or even all three of them — while also doing away with the problem of sizing norms.
Brands including Collina Strada, Pangaia and H&M-owned Weekday have partnered with Unspun to test out the concept. With the latest round of funding, which is led by Lowercarbon and also includes Climate Capital, SOSV, Signia Ventures and MVP Ventures — past investors included 50Y and the Mills Fabrica — Unspun is moving now to position itself as a manufacturing partner out to change how manufacturing itself is done. (Unspun’s vision is also a circular one, saying it eventually wants to take garments back for unspinning and then re-weaving the resulting yarn into new garments.)
The first brand partnerships will be produced in the Oakland facility, and Unspun plans to integrate Vega into a few brand partners’ existing production facilities. “The ecosystem and know-how of these seasoned apparel manufacturers will be a critical part of Vega’s success, allowing us to perfect the 3D weaving production process and factory flow that can ultimately become the Vega microfactory standard of the future,” says Esponnette.
The long-term vision is to establish 3D weaving microfactories near existing delivery infrastructure – just outside large cities and within range of next-day delivery, she explains, which would mean no international shipping or cross-country trucking would be required. “A key advantage of a simplified, automated, and localised manufacturing process like Vega is that products for NYC can be made in NYC and that tiny island in the Philippines can now be self-sufficient with its own factory.”
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