Reducing Waste in Fashion: Sustainable Practices

Let’s talk about one of fashion’s biggest open secrets: waste.

Not the kind you see on runways or in polished lookbooks, but the invisible kind, piles of overproduced garments, discarded fabric samples, and all the material, water, and emissions wasted along the way.

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It’s not just a byproduct of poor planning anymore. It’s a structural issue, and it’s costing brands, suppliers, and the planet.

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📉 The Data We Can’t Ignore

The numbers are staggering:

• The fashion industry produces 100–150 billion garments per year, double what it did in 2000.
• 92 million tonnes of textiles end up in landfills annually, that’s a garbage truck full of clothing every single second..
• Between 15 to 45 billion garments go unsold every year.
• In the UK alone, 300,000 tonnes of clothing are discarded annually.
• The fashion industry generates up to 8% of global carbon emissions, more than international flights and maritime shipping combined.

And while these figures are alarming, there's another layer that’s often overlooked: sampling waste.

📦 The Sample Problem

If you've worked in product development or sourcing, you already know how it goes:

A designer makes a tweak. The supplier sends a new version. Someone misreads a spec sheet. A sample arrives late, or worse, wrong. And back it goes. Multiply that by dozens of styles across multiple seasons and regions, and the waste snowballs fast.

Not only does this waste fabric and energy, it costs time, money, and opportunity.

Most of these samples don’t even make it into production. They're discarded, shelved, or forgotten. And in a world where sustainability is no longer a nice-to-have but a core business need, we can't afford this model anymore.

💡 The Future: Smarter Sourcing, Less Waste

This is exactly where Justly comes in:  We're building a sourcing platform that doesn’t just streamline workflows, it actively helps brands reduce waste by minimizing sampling, avoiding errors, and eliminating miscommunication.

Here’s how we do it:

✔️AI-Organized Briefs from Messy Notes

You leave a design meeting with vague sketches, fabric ideas, and supply notes. Instead of sending a dozen unclear emails, you drop your notes into Justly.
Our AI transforms them into a structured, detailed sourcing request. This clarity from the start avoids costly errors and repeated samples.

✔️ Broadcasting & Communication in One Click

With one click, you send your brief to multiple suppliers, no copy-pasting or missed details. Each supplier gets the exact same information, minimizing misalignment and reducing the risk of needing "do-over" samples.

✔️Smart Response Tracking & Data Tables

As suppliers respond, Justly automatically captures and compares lead times, pricing, MOQs, and certifications, all in a single dashboard. You can make better decisions earlier, and only sample what’s truly viable.

✔️ Reducing the Feedback Loop

With our AI assistant, OLI, sourcing managers can get instant answers, clarify doubts, and keep all communication centralized. Instead of losing time in back-and-forth emails that often lead to misproductions, you keep the process tight and precise.

✔️ From Sourcing to Ordering, Seamlessly

Once a decision is made, you can place a stock order in three clicks. All files, POs, quotes, invoices, are saved and organized automatically, helping you avoid duplication, delays, or last-minute overordering.

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🌱 Sustainability Through Efficiency

Let’s be clear: we can’t talk about sustainability without talking about operational efficiency.
Every sample avoided, every shipment not sent, every communication clarified, that’s less carbon, less cost, and less waste.

At Justly, we believe sustainable sourcing doesn’t have to be complicated, it just has to be smart.

And that’s exactly what we’re building.

💬 Ready to Cut Waste from Your Sourcing Workflow?

Whether you’re an emerging brand or an established player, if you’ve ever looked at a pile of unused samples and thought, “There has to be a better way,”...you were right! 

👉  📩 Click HERE to join the waiting list for our BETA and start sourcing smarter, and more sustainable.