Illuminating Design: Building a Circular Fashion Industry with Automation
Interview by Liv Jenks
In this installment of “Illuminating Design,” Stanford Womxn in Design’s interview series, we reached out to Beth Esponnette, the Co-Founder and Chief Product Officer of unspun, a startup pioneering a sustainable future for fashion and textile manufacturing. Using 3D body scanning technology, unspun makes custom-fit jeans — and soon, other garments — that can be ordered on demand; a business model that seeks to eliminate the need for an inventory and cuts the waste caused by mainstream production methods. We sat down with Esponnette to understand her journey to becoming a fashion-tech designer, the origin story of unspun, and her vision for a fashion industry built on a circular economy.
Liv Jenks: To begin, could you tell us a little bit about how you got into design?
Beth Esponnette: In high school, I really liked art and science, so I was looking for ways to pull those two things together and design just sits perfectly in the middle. But why clothing? Why was it so specific? I don’t totally know, but all of my college searching was centered on fashion design programs, which is funny because I like fashion but I don’t love it. I don’t sketch clothing in my free time, and my wardrobe — I wish it was exciting, but it’s pretty plain and focused on versatility. Fashion is such an everyday science and art that’s ubiquitous — it’s around each of us — but it’s also a bit under-appreciated, which is why I think I’ve gone after it.
During my undergrad I studied clothing, and it was very glamorous, and I learned about how to help people express themselves and how to create wearable artforms. I was so fascinated by the whole thing, and it was always a positive to me. Then after graduation, I went into the outdoor apparel industry because I really love functional clothing, and to me, that’s really where the art blends with the science. It just felt like if anyone was doing the right thing [from a production standpoint], then it must be the outdoor apparel industry because they should stand for the environment more than anyone else. But they weren’t because of stakeholders and shareholders pressuring them to do business — business tends to win at the end of the day. At these companies, we had so many problems because we were trying to anticipate — guess, really — what people would want, what would be trending, how many to make, how much material to buy. Then after all that guessing, we would re-evaluate all the mistakes we made and start all over, having wasted a lot of time, resources, and physical materials. I just found it so weird, and it led me to wonder why we don’t build on demand, which is where unspun came from.
I don’t really overthink things; I tend to just chase my curiosity when it’s pulling me in a certain direction, so I went into the Manufacturing and Product Design graduate program at Stanford to try to broaden my understanding of how I could make products on-demand, when customers ask for them.
Jenks: It sounds like from the very beginning of your career you were questioning some of the practices and norms of the fashion industry. At what point did you decide to start your own company to answer some of the problems you were noticing?
Esponnette: Sometimes people tell you that there was one super clear moment when they had the idea to start their company. But for me, since I was already in the fashion industry and surrounded by the culture, it wasn’t so much of a one day thing. But one of the last straws was this meeting at an outdoor, functional apparel company I worked for, and we were discussing tents that we had made that season that didn’t sell, and we were already planning tents for next year. We had all these tents to get rid of, and I remember the head of the department basically said we could trash them, incinerate them, or send them to a third world country. And the donation part sounds nice, but we know now that so many countries are denying our donations because it’s basically our trash that they don’t have a use for either. That sounded crazy to me. If only we had just made things when people wanted them, then we wouldn’t run into this problem. So that planted the seed. And I think — even though I hadn’t been to Stanford yet or experienced design thinking there — I started to develop unspun’s “How might we” question, which was: How might we build on-demand? That first idea opened up a lot of avenues for exploration that I pursued at Stanford.
Jenks: Central to unspun’s mission is a care for quality and craft balanced with leveraging technology to minimize waste. Given these guiding values, how would you define sustainable design?
Esponnette: This is a question that I’ll never have a 100 percent solid answer to because I think we should always be asking ourselves this. But for me, right now it’s all about making sure that someone wants and needs what you’re making, which begs another question: how do you know that someone wants and needs your product? I think we understand the “want” part, by knowing that people are buying and recommending it. But how do you define need in the clothing industry? Because we probably only need a few outfits, but we all have a lot of outfits. One way to define need is if they’re wearing it at least a couple times a week because it’s very intentional, it serves a purpose, and it’s something that someone wants to wear.
Jenks: One of the major issues with the fashion industry is the amount of waste — both from how we produce clothes to how quickly trends change to fuel rapid consumption. You mentioned that a circular system where nothing goes to waste could be the answer to this — what would a circular fashion industry look like?
Esponnette: In an idealistic world, we would shrink our closets, and we would only have what they really need. But instead of fighting people’s desire for more, let’s work with it. We’re in a world where we want the next best thing, which is in part because of the economy we’re in but it’s also human psychology for more — for the next thing — rather than grounding ourselves in what we have already. As much as I hate to admit it, I think that’s who we are as humans, so let’s work with it by turning the linear life of products into a circular one. I think that would allow us to have that happy medium where people don’t have a ton in their closets — not because they haven’t bought anything in a while — but because they’ve traded out what they don’t wear and it’s become a circular system where unwanted garments get re-made.
Jenks: How could we make the transition to a circular fashion industry?
Esponnette: One of the huge hurdles in building sustainable products is making them more affordable. I think it’s amazing that the minimum wage is increasing in the United States, but if we’re going to make garments here — from a production standpoint — it’s just not going to be possible to sell the products that we make here because they’ll be so expensive, when people are used to paying a few dollars for something. It’s just not a fair playing field. And the only way around that (locally) is automation.
[A future of automation] is near but not so near. From unspun’s perspective, we’re launching our first products from our 3D weaving machine this fall, but it’s going to be a launch of 100 products, which is tiny compared to the actual industry. It will slowly scale up from that. In about three years, it will become cost competitive for us to produce in countries like Mexico, Bangladesh, or other parts of Southeast Asia because we’ll be using automation. And in about seven years, the same will become true for us to be U.S.-based.
With our current process — without automation — we’re at the premium level, basically making the Tesla model jean. The only way to make it cheaper would be to reduce the quality of our materials, which is a concession we don’t want to make. We could also make fewer options, but the long-term vision is to be at mass-market prices of $60-$100 with the 3D weaving, automation, and localization.
Jenks: You mentioned that this fall unspun will release your first line made with your 3D weaving machine. Could you tell us a little bit about the design process for this line?
Esponnette: For our fall line, we’re making a big change from our past products and intentionally not calling our pants “jeans” because they will be seamless due to their automated production. Jeans are known by their seams, so we want to celebrate that our pants don’t have seams because they will be created through this new and different process. Basically, right now the clothing industry is broken down into: 1D, which is yarn that’s woven into fabric — 2D — and then the final garment stitched from that fabric is 3D. And rather than damaging the material we’re working with to make the final product, we took inspiration from basket-making and knitting, which are seamless processes, to cut out the 2D step and make the yarn directly into the garment through automation.
Right now, we’re sourcing and testing yarns on the thicker side for our seamless jeans, and we’re definitely going after the wide-leg trend. All of the cotton is California-grown, and we’re exploring natural dyes and patterns.
Jenks: Many SWID members are just beginning their design careers and journeys. Having built your own company and pioneered such innovative technology in fashion, what do you wish you had known when you were starting out as a designer?
Esponnette: When you’re early in your career, try new things. Go for it. Learn as much as you can. Not that you can’t do it later, but it’s much easier to do when you’re starting. You can do it through internships, rotation programs — be the wild card on a team.
