Are Microfactories the Answer to Making Fashion on Demand?

It still can’t compete on price with very basic, cheap-to-make products like plain cotton T-shirts (in fact, Young says block colours in general aren’t suited to the technology because it wouldn’t be economical to print a full piece of cloth). Though once pattern and print are involved, that’s where brands will start to see savings on what Young calls “shadow costs”, such as import, shipping and warehousing.

A limited choice or an opportunity for innovation?

Rodinia has a selection of base materials for its clients to choose from (knits and leather are excluded as they don’t suit its automated process), an approach Binns says is already well established in the swimwear sector. It’s efficient, but for Isnurh’s Todbjerg, the trade-off is a limitation on what they can actually produce at Rodinia. “The range of products that Rodinia can print on is quite limited. This is partially due to their demand for certifications and the fact that their machine is not able to print on ‘thick’ or ‘hairy’ yarns, and fabrics such as wool and cashmere,” he says.

Other companies refine the model even further. Knitwear manufacturer Knitup, for instance, has a library of silhouettes, materials, prints and textures for brands to pick and mix.

Could these parameters refocus the design process and press brands to innovate within the boundaries of what’s on offer? What’s more likely is a mix-and-match approach, where brands distribute their production between factories according to what each one can offer, as Isnurh does. “For smaller brands, it’s an attractive route to market,” says Binns of Rodinia’s model. “But a lot want to put their own stamp on things and apply their own brand handwriting. It’s very hard to engineer that model into a brand that already exists.”

Fabric replenishment is automated so the microfactory has exactly what it needs, when it needs it. An internal algorithm identifies when a material will be popular — according to season and by drawing from past demand — when it will sell through, and when it will therefore need to be replenished. Lead times for each specific material are factored in too, so stock always arrives timely enough to meet demand. “We don’t want thousands of base materials. We don’t need that,” Young says. There may be a future where brands can order suitably certified materials directly to the factory to widen scope, she adds.

Like Rodinia, Danish menswear brand Son of a Tailor, which owns microfactory Son Supply, focuses on purchasing fabrics and other materials in small batches with shortened lead times. The brand’s CEO and co-founder Jess Fleischer says he has already seen the micro-supply chain shift in action. “We have seen washing, printing and logistics facilities accepting to adjust their processes according to the cadence set by manufacturing, so from our experience, demand-driven manufacturing has had a very positive impact on the entire supply chain,” he says.

What’s next?

Depending on the product categories in production, Rodinia’s microfactory can operate at a capacity of approximately 700,000 to 1 million garments per year. As the figures highlighted via The Or Foundation’s ‘Speak Volumes’ campaign demonstrate, this is more than enough to cover the needs of smaller brands yet represents a drop in the ocean when it comes to the production volumes of larger brands.

Currently operating at capacity, and unable to answer all manufacturing requests — a clear-cut case for its expansion — the real impact will come with extensive growth, at a level where it could take responsibility for a meaningful share of a larger brand’s impact. An extended network of microfactories with different specialisms will also be crucial to enable brands to adopt the manufacturing model throughout their product range.

The move to a circular economy also presents an opportunity. Rodinia prints only the sections that are being cut out; therefore the raw, unprocessed scraps left over from production are easier to recycle and could in future, Young hopes, be fed into a circular ecosystem that regenerates those scraps into new base materials.

It’s here where Philipp Meister, global fashion and sporting goods lead at Quantis, sees an opportunity to partner with novel material innovation companies to double down on sustainability efforts. “Lots of those innovators are still in the incubation phase. And that’s an interesting phase to then collaborate with microfactories, because they don’t need to set up large-scale material production,” he says. Meister calls the potential link-up of multiple small-scale entities a “micro-supply chain”, which could see the agility and efficiency of microfactories echoed across different tiers of production.

With less waste, shorter transit to market, and the use of fewer chemical inputs and less water, the microfactory model certainly appears to be able to reduce the impact of production where it’s applied. Though the experts Vogue Business spoke to agree that the limitations of microfactories mean they cannot replace the wholesale operations of traditional factories, nor can they simply plug into the fashion industry in its current guise if they are to have meaningful impact. “If we don’t reduce the amount of products the fashion industry is producing, it’s useless,” says Meister.