Thirty billion garments a year are never worn
Not worn out. Not handed down. Never worn at all.
Around 100 billion garments are made every year — more than thirteen for every person alive, a figure that doubled between 2000 and 2014. Estimates put 20 to 30% of that production as never sold: made, shipped, stored, marked down, and eventually disposed of without anyone putting them on once.
That's the statistic everyone quotes. The more interesting question is why it happens — because it isn't carelessness, and it isn't anyone being cartoonishly wasteful. It's a set of perfectly rational decisions that add up to something irrational.
Why the maths pushes everyone toward more
Four things, and they compound.
Minimum order quantities. Most factories won't cut fabric below a certain number of units — often several hundred per colourway, sometimes thousands. If you want a garment made at all, the minimum is the floor, regardless of how many you think you'll sell.
Per-unit cost falls as volume rises. Pattern-making, sampling, setup, freight and duties are largely fixed. Spread them over 300 pieces and each garment carries a lot of overhead; spread them over 3,000 and it nearly disappears. Every quote a brand receives makes ordering more look cheaper than ordering less.
Running out is punished more than overstocking. Sell out in a week and you've lost sales, disappointed customers, and left shelf space empty. Over-order and you have a markdown problem — which feels survivable, and gets dealt with later. Given that asymmetry, almost every forecast leans high.
Discounting is easier than disposal. When it doesn't sell, the route is well worn: full price, then 30% off, then outlet, then a clearance jobber, then whatever's left. By the final step the garment has cost more to handle than it's worth, which is how destruction becomes the rational option.
Nobody in that chain set out to waste anything. Each decision made sense on its own.
What happens to the ones that don't sell
For a long time the honest answer was: they were destroyed. Quietly, and at scale — partly to protect brand pricing, partly because it was simply the cheapest way to clear a warehouse.
That's now changing, though by regulation rather than by choice. France banned the destruction of unsold non-food goods under its anti-waste law, phased in from 2022, requiring excess stock to be donated, reused or recycled instead. The EU followed, prohibiting large companies from destroying unsold textiles from July 2026, extending to medium-sized businesses in 2030.
The scale that legislation is responding to: an estimated 4–9% of unsold textiles in Europe are destroyed before they're ever worn, generating around 5.6 million tonnes of CO₂.
It's worth noticing what those laws don't do. They govern what happens to the surplus. They don't touch the reasons it exists.
Why “make better clothes” isn't the fix on its own
The usual response to all this is quality. Make things that last, and people will buy fewer of them.
We believe that — it's most of what we think about. But it only works downstream of the volume decision. A beautifully made garment that was over-ordered by 2,000 units is still 2,000 garments looking for owners who don't exist. Durability determines what happens to a piece after someone buys it. It has no effect at all on the ones nobody buys.
And there's a quieter problem underneath: people now keep the clothes they do buy about 36% less time than they did fifteen years ago. Making things last only helps if the intention is to keep them.
So we went at the volume
This is the part where we explain ourselves, briefly.
We release in Episodes — numbered runs, deliberately small, sized to the capsule rather than to a forecast. When one sells through it closes. No reprint, no reorder, no reserve stock held back in case demand returns.
It's not a clever system. It's just the one decision in that whole chain that was entirely ours to make. We can't change factory minimums or freight economics, and we're not going to pretend a small label in the Byron Bay hinterland is fixing an industry. But how many to make was ours, so that's the lever we pulled.
The costs are real and worth stating. Small runs carry far more overhead per garment, and that sits in the price. Sizes go quickly and unevenly, and the Episode is often finished for most people while a size or two remains. And we turn down repeat business regularly — our best-selling piece has sold 281 over its life, which in most businesses is an instruction to make five hundred more.
What we get for it is simple: almost nothing goes unsold, because we make less than we could sell rather than more.
We've gone back on it once. FLO sold out and people didn't let it go — emails, messages, comments on unrelated posts — and after weeks of going back and forth we ran it again. Worth saying plainly rather than leaving people to notice. One Episode came back. The others haven't.
The thing we'd want you to take away
Not that small batches are virtuous. Plenty of small brands overproduce, and plenty of large ones are working hard on this.
It's that overproduction isn't a moral failing, it's an economic default — and defaults only change when somebody chooses to absorb the cost of doing it differently. Minimums, volume pricing and forecast asymmetry will keep pushing every brand toward more until the buying side makes less worth doing.
Which is mostly a question of what people are prepared to pay for, and how long they're prepared to keep it.
Our first Journal entry, on microplastics in clothing, is the other half of the same argument.
🤎 Ayumi & Arki
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