Deadstock
Perfectly good fabric, made for an order that no longer exists.
- What it is
- Surplus rolls from mills, houses and cancelled production
- What it is not
- Offcuts, factory seconds, or flawed cloth sold cheap
- How we buy
- The whole roll, at whatever length exists
- What it means for you
- A short run, and no chance of a reissue
How it happens
Fabric is committed long before a garment is.
A mill will not weave 40 metres. Minimums start in the hundreds, so a label ordering fabric for a collection orders more than it needs and accepts the remainder as a cost of doing business. Mills themselves over-run deliberately, because a short delivery is worse than a long one.
Then things change. A collection is cut, a buyer pulls out, a season is cancelled, a colour is dropped after the fabric has already been dyed and finished. The cloth exists. The garment never will.
This is not a scandal and we are not presenting it as one. It is arithmetic — the consequence of committing to material months before committing to a product. But it leaves a great deal of good cloth sitting in warehouses.
Photography · 4:5
A warehouse aisle: part-rolls stacked and labelled by season, several years deep.
Where it ends up
Three normal endings, none of which involve anyone wearing it.
01
It waits
Rolls sit in storage while someone hopes a buyer appears. Warehouses are rarely climate-controlled, so within a few years the outer metres are marked by damp, sun or dust and the roll is worth less than the shelf it occupies.
02
It is sold by weight
A jobber buys the lot by the kilo and resells it as an unnamed fabric. It gets used, which is better than nothing — but the fibre content, weight and origin are lost along the way, and with them any chance of it being valued properly.
03
It is shredded
Broken down for insulation, mattress filling or wiping cloth. A wool suiting that would have made fifteen jackets becomes stuffing. This is called recycling, and it is the last useful thing that can happen to it.
The most efficient thing anyone can do with forty metres of finished silk is make clothes out of it.
What we do instead
How a roll becomes a run.
01
We are offered a roll
Usually a call or a photograph. Mills and houses we have bought from before come to us first, which is the only advantage of having done this for a while.02
We test before we buy
A metre is washed, pressed, hung overnight and rubbed for colourfastness. Surplus is often surplus for a reason, and about a third of what we are offered we decline.03
We buy the whole thing
Not a cut length — the roll, at whatever length it happens to be. We measure it ourselves, because stated lengths on surplus rolls are optimistic.04
The roll decides the garment
Weight, width and handle determine what it can become. A 90 cm width rules out a wide trouser however much we might want one.05
We divide the metres
Total length divided by the metres per garment gives the run. Forty metres of silk at 2.4 metres a dress is eleven dresses. That is the entire production plan.06
We cut a few, and hold the rest
The most requested sizes are cut and finished so they can ship immediately. The remaining metres stay on the shelf so the piece can still be made to measure.07
The piece retires
When the roll is finished, the piece is finished. We do not remake it in a substitute fabric, because that would be a different garment wearing the same name.
Straight answers
What people reasonably want to know.
Is deadstock actually better, or just a good story?
For the fabric itself, it is unambiguously better: no new water, dye, energy or land.
The longer answer
The environmental cost of a garment is dominated by its material, and using cloth that has already been made removes that cost entirely rather than reducing it. What deadstock does not fix is everything downstream — sewing, shipping, and how long you keep it. That is why the rest of this site talks about construction and repair as much as about fabric.
Does this mean the fabric is old?
Sometimes years old, and it makes no practical difference to a natural fibre stored properly.
The longer answer
Wool, linen and cotton do not degrade meaningfully in storage. We check the outer metres for light and damp marking and discard what is affected. Silk is the one to watch, and we test every silk roll for tendering before we commit.
Why not just tell us the mills?
Because naming them is how we stop being offered fabric.
The longer answer
Surplus is sold quietly. Houses do not want their over-ordering published, and mills do not want their overruns catalogued. We can tell you the fibre, the weight, the width, the region and how it came to be surplus — everything that affects the garment you are buying. The supplier's name affects only our access.
What happens to your own offcuts?
Anything above a hand's width is kept and used. The rest goes to a quilting collective.
The longer answer
Facings, bindings, pocket bags, ties and straps come out of the offcuts of earlier pieces, which is why a jacket's seam binding is sometimes a different fabric from the jacket. Below that size, scraps are bagged by fibre and passed on rather than binned.