Welcome back to the Interline Podcast. This episode was recorded a few weeks before the United Nations 30th Conference on Climate Change, or COP30. But now, by the time of its release, that event and a host of other climate and circularity focused sessions are happening or have already happened. And for fashion, that puts us square in an annual period that evokes a lot of feelings and commitments.
This is a time that serves as a reminder of just how much woolly language, how many uncertain definitions, and how little clarity really exists around circularity and sustainability. Getting that kind of clarity often requires a different vantage point.
And this guest has exactly that.
Paul Foulkes-Arellano is an advocate for the circular economy across different industries. He’s a board member and non-executive director for many innovative companies in fashion and in other sectors. Paul has co-written a book, ‘Materials & Sustainability: Building a Circular Future’, and recently finished recording a new e-learning course called ‘Transforming Business with the Circular Economy’ for the e-learning platform Do Epic Good, available from the end of October.
Paul has some strong opinions, including that recycling is actually evidence of failure where the circular economy is concerned. I sat down to extract some more of those from him as well as getting his perspective on material science, software and other tools, and why footwear is at the vanguard of using those to further its circularity ambitions.
The transcript below has been lightly edited.
Okay, Paul Foulkes-Arellano, welcome to the Interline Podcast. It’s great to have you.
It’s great to be here.
Let’s start with some definitions and some measurable baselines. It’s easy to fall into a conversation like this and hand wave away the idea of the climate change imperative as something that everybody intimately understands and feels. I’d like us to be specific instead. What are some of the environmental tipping points that we’re either close to reaching or have already passed? And how much time is left to either avoid the ones that are coming up or to mitigate the impacts of the ones that are inevitable?
A very important question. I always refer to climate change as industrial climate transformation, which I feel is a lot more accurate, but that’s just one of the threats. We do have this climate transformation, but anybody who spends a lot of time looking at the internet of the environment will be aware of the nine planetary boundaries. And if they’re not, they should have a look at a website called Stockholm Resilience Center. They’ve identified nine planetary boundaries that we might cross. As of last month, we’d actually crossed seven of the nine. I’m not going to spend too long doing a science lesson, but those are climate change, fresh water change, land system change, biosphere integrity, novel entities (toxic chemicals and plastics), ocean acidification (just last month), and biogeochemical flows – which is the sort of natural cyclical movement of essential elements like carbon or nitrogen and water, which are pretty important to human life.
So we have all these natural pathways on our planet, which keep us, the humans, alive. But we humans with our own activities like deforestation, and burning fossil fuels have basically created these imbalances in the environment. So, that’s kind of where we are. Those are the tipping points. But you asked, how much time have we got left and how we might mitigate them. In terms of time, everybody is saying 2050, 2060, but that’s to survive. That’s not to live well. If you look at the amount of flooding, crop failure, forest fires, that’s not living. Just a few weeks ago in Bulgaria, there were cars going down the streets again in a river. And this you see probably every month in Europe. This is now the new normal. So I think we might have passed that tipping point already.
And there is some mitigation, but it’s percentual; it’s small fractions of the total. So we may be mitigating some of these kinds of human activities, one or two percent per year. But then our population is growing. So it’s not 8 billion, it’s 8.1 billion. And basically overproduction is wiping out any gains that we might have.
Starting us on a justifiably gloomy note, which sets the context for a lot of the conversation to come. I think the volume issue and the overproduction issue is a particularly pertinent one when we think about fashion. So what role does fashion, which we use as a kind of catchall term for apparel, footwear and accessories, currently play in either perpetuating or worsening some of those outcomes? Obviously, overproducing is a massive issue. It’s synonymous with fashion, but it’s certainly not the only issue.
There’s a lot of defense now from certain people in the textile industry who depend on the fashion industry to say, “all those figures about fashion are wrong”, “actually fashion isn’t the bad guy. It’s a whole pile of other things,” and “We shouldn’t really be worried about fashion.” But we have published figures. Only a couple of weeks ago, probably the foremost body on textiles globally, Textile Exchange, published their Materials Market Report for 2025 and the production of fibre has gone up from an astronomical 125 million tonnes in 2023, to 132 million tonnes in 2024. And when you look at what that increase is, it’s basically virgin fossil-based synthetics textiles. So we’re talking about, in one year, an additional seven million tons of polyester and nylon, which is never going to biodegrade. It’s going to landfill; it’s as simple as that.
And it’s not just going into fashion, it goes into automotive seats, it goes into home furnishings. But fashion is a huge player in emissions. I always look at someone who’s an expert in fashion metrics, Dr. Simon Kew, and he has worked out using all the figures available that fashion emissions are not 2%, nor are they 10%. Published fashion emissions, when you do all the maths, is probably about 5% of all global emissions. But when you look at informal production, and you have to remember, a lot of clothing is going under the radar. There are whole continents where they’re not measuring every piece of clothing being made. It’s a big world. You’re probably talking about 7% of all emissions belonging to the fashion industry. And fashion is apparel, it’s footwear, it’s accessories; it’s not just dresses and leggings.
That is, again, essential context. It’s very easy to get hung up on the idea of your typical scope 1 emissions or looking at emissions from the perspective of shipping, logistics, distribution. And I’m not saying that mitigation strategies are a bad idea in those areas – knowing more about your direct emissions is a positive step – but scaling up the production of virgin fossil-fuel-based fibers to that sort of volume presumably more than offsets any gains that would be made from any scope 1 improvements.
Absolutely. And I think the bit that the fashion industry likes to forget is the end of life. So the fashion industry will champion resell and say, hey, look, Vinted is now the biggest retailer in France. We’ve done it, we’ve made it. Whilst forgetting that France isn’t the world and forgetting that you have huge, huge nations whose populations are increasing massively and all that their citizens can afford is polyester. So that’s going to create more throwaway polyester garments, which are so poor in quality, they cannot be recycled. So there’s lots of people waving flags saying, wait, look, look what we’ve done, but forgetting that actually the reality underneath hasn’t.
In fact, it’s getting much worse.
I think what we’ve just talked about there is heavily weighted towards new product. It’s heavily weighted towards an industry whose model is bringing new stuff to market. As you rightly pointed out, a lot of that product is incorporating some measure of polyester or petroleum-derived fibers. Let’s jump forward a little bit to understand what a different model would look like, a nonlinear one.
I want to ask you about what you think is successful and sustainable in both the literal sense of being endlessly repeatable, and in the way people use the sustainability label today. What would a successful and sustainable circular business model for fashion actually look like? How would the industry be structured? How would the incentives line up for brands, retailers, their upstream partners and consumers?
I think the keyword there is ‘incentives’ because without incentives, nothing changes. And when we talk about incentives in any industry, we mean money or we mean what I would call sort of negative incentives. So legislation fines…
Commercial incentives are definitely the stronger ones.
With any circular system, to make it happen more quickly, you need the carrot, and you also need the stick right through the chain, not just at the consumer end. So governments are very, very good at taxing consumers. They’re really good at finding ways of putting money into their pockets to so-called ‘deal’ with the situation by taxing consumers. But they never think about maybe the opposite way around.
Something I support would be a zero sales tax or a zero VAT on pre-loved items. Right now it’s 20% in the UK. So as a garment is purchased, the government will receive 20% tax on that garment. And when it’s resold, they will receive another 20%. And when that item may be sold for a third time, it’s also 20%. So why are you paying tax on something where the government has already had it? If that 20 % comes off the pre-loved item, it immediately becomes more attractive. Bizarrely, if you look at the way that packaging works, if you have a bottle of beer that is a refill, it goes back to the brewery, gets refilled, and you only pay for that glass bottle once. You do not pay time and time again. So there seems to be an inconsistency there between packaging and clothing.
That’s just one way of looking at it. But we also need tech. Tech has advanced massively. We’re living in a completely digital age, but we’re not doing so really with our goods, with our clothing. You can now get full traceability either with a printed RFID – so using silver ink to print an RFID – or a unique QR code. And that would allow you then to introduce a genuine extended producer responsibility, the EPR tax. Right now that’s pennies or euros. I have spoken to a recycler, reprocessor of clothing and it costs them around $6 to $7 to reprocess something. That’s the real cost of reprocessed, so we need to charge on new clothing the reality of that. So all virgin clothing or new clothing needs about $6 or $7 added to it and pre-loved clothing needs to lose that 20% sales tax. That starts to even up the field. It starts to make the imperative to put clothing back into the market in a circular system more interesting. It’s all about economics. People don’t do things for the love of it unless they’re a charity. And the fashion industry is most certainly not a charity.
Very well put. And I think you hear a lot about creating some of those economic and behavioural incentives to encourage people to buy used/pre-loved. You hear less about the incentives that de-emphasise the value in creating new, because I think that’s where any commercial enterprise is going to get hung up, does selling pre-loved cannibalise selling new?
Because any commercial enterprise will say: there’s a business unit here, there’s a business unit over there. If I can make those things balance, that’s fine. The issue for any commercial enterprise is when one of those tips the scale too heavily in its favor. And then that’s where attention goes. That’s where investment goes. That’s where time goes. What you’ve just described, making it more price competitive to sell and buy pre-loved and making it onerous to introduce new, that’s where you do start to get that balance. And I think that’s what’s required.
Yes. And I think I’ve read about cannibalisation recently. How when people start to sell pre-loved, there is a of their own pre-loved. So a big fashion brand selling pre-loved, there is a period of cannibalisation that will last several weeks. After that, it evens out. I’ve studied, I’ve done two Master’s degrees, both of which included economics. One was European Economics, one was an MBA where I did International Economics. And you see all these patterns in sort of macro and micro economics and they play out in real life as well.
So I think we understand what a good vision for a circular model would look like. Let’s just put a pin in that for a second, and talk a little bit about how far the current industry in aggregate terms is from that vision, because it feels like there’s a big delta between an industry that’s currently very much built on arms length, out of sight, high volume, offshore sourcing and production where endless growth of new product introductions is the primary yardstick for success, and what we just described there. So without wanting to sound too extreme, it feels like the current fashion system is incompatible to some extent with that vision without a more wholesale transformation. Is that the right way to look at this? Is there just a really big gap and we need to run straight at addressing that gap, or is there more common ground than we realise and actually more incremental progress to be made?
No, that gap is absolutely enormous. Global fashion right now is a prime example of the linear economy. So if you want to show what the take-make waste economy looks like, you show a picture of fashion. It’s pillage the planet, manufacture, and then dump.
You know, the only way to change that is to change the fiscal and market environment. And I think you said arms length, out of sight. And then, it is the brands who don’t own their factories. If the brands were forced to own their own factories and pay living wages that would make a huge change to how they operated at the moment.
They have a ‘get out of jail free’ card and they can wash their hands of any commitments. They can just cancel their orders at any minute and just keep on with this horrendous linear model. And I think the only way to really change that, and this would really be radical, but in a sense, it’s not that radical, it would mean going back to the 1930s. We would need a reshored or an onshore clothing industry making garments within a hundred miles of point of purchase. That’s what’s needed. When my grandmother was a seamstress in Manchester back in the 1930s, their emissions were coming from coal. That’s what was making emissions, not all the transport, not the deforestation, not the extraction of fossil fuels.
And, in fact, probably a lot of what she sewed would have been sold not within a hundred miles, but within 10 to 20 miles. People will have bought those garments in Manchester shops. So we’ve gone so far from that where I know from recent work that’s been done, a lot of goods are coming into the country that aren’t even what they say they are. We can now scan garments. There’s a company that makes a product called FabriTell, where you can scan a garment and it tells you what it is. And what you think is silk is polyester and what you think is wool is not wool at all. It’s a mixture of wool and nylon. It’s not even a truthful industry.
Yeah, and I think a lot of that mistruth is a direct result of that lack of proximity as well. When things happen half the world away, there is no substitute for direct observation and direct ownership and direct control. And there are verticalised brands that prove this out, especially from a kind of shipping and efficiency point of view, but also from a pure visibility perspective as well.
We’ve mentioned regulations, but we’ve not gone straight at it. So I would like to. And we’ve talked about the economic incentives, then you’ve talked about the stick. How far do you think regulation is going to be capable of encouraging or mandating the fashion industry to close that gap? Cause I think there’s been a sentiment amongst brands in particular that applying with the letter of the rules is all that’s necessary. And there’s also this feeling that the letter of the rules is always going to get progressively softened during adoption and implementation. And then the spirit of the rules feels like it’s being lost. I think, understandably, that leads people to the conclusion that legislation and or legislators aren’t up to the task, or at least that regulations aren’t up to the task in isolation and that the majority of brands are therefore not going to self-regulate.
What’s your outlook on the legislative side of things?
I look at legislation across industry. So as a circular economist, I’m looking at waste electronics, I’m looking at packaging, food and beverage, as well as fashion and textiles. What’s clear is that very often the brands are a lot smarter than the legislators. So because the legislation is in consultation to begin with, brands and industries and associations can respond and they can water that legislation down. And we’ve seen a lot of that happening in Europe, in the US in particular, in the UK, across Asia, and in Australia. Another continent where it has been watered down and has suddenly got a lot tougher right through to Africa, where actually the African governments have been very tough and they have introduced bans and they’ve made it stick and they’ve arrested people and they’ve fined people.
So where it’s interesting is that the EU, which is at the heart of circular legislation, it’s been very watered down and it’s up to each country individually, each nation within the EU, to implement it. And they are not implementing it in the same way. So France is implementing circular legislation to the letter. Countries like Italy are kind of pretending it doesn’t exist and isn’t there. And I’ve heard that from many people on the ground. Last Thursday, I was in Slovakia, and they need help. They don’t have recycling plants for textiles, even close to them. They don’t have infrastructure for textile collection. So even though they may agree with legislation in theory, and are voted to implement it, they’re not getting the help from Brussels to actually execute. And that’s where there’s this massive gap between legislation and execution.
So often it’s watered down legislation. The brands learn to comply. They know very well how to tick boxes. They can even buy software platforms that tick the boxes for them. But ultimately, legislation needs to have teeth. And any legislation right now in the world doesn’t. There’s one piece, the New York Fashion Act, which does have teeth and which has upset brands. Outside that, the brands seem to be saying, yes, give it to us, because they know they can get around it.
And I think tied to that is the question of what it means for brands who are in markets where regulation is at least relatively toothless. What it means for brands that decide to self-regulate, the kinds of companies that see compliance as not a final objective, but as a floor to build from, a way to pioneer new products, new initiatives driven by their values, and put together new business models.
What you have in those markets is a very uneven competitive playing field. If it’s true that real world consumer spending isn’t backing up the idea that shoppers’ consciences are what drives the industry towards circularity, then it falls on those kinds of companies with that vision to self-regulate to become leaders. It feels like they need to find a way to be pioneers at a whole bunch of different things at the same time as being pioneers at the product level and creating real brand value. I’ve actually recently interviewed the Founder of a climate-conscious menswear brand who is essentially saying the same thing, which is that external legislation is not what drives their ambitions to disclose as much as they possibly can about their supply chains. That’s something they are doing of their own volition.
To get there, to get to where that’s valuable and to get to where that becomes a competitive differentiator, they still need to make better products than everybody else. That is not what’s going to drive consumer adoption. What’s your perspective on that? How do we think about that, evening that playing field perhaps for the brands that do volunteer to self-regulate? Or is it just a case of saying they have to be the pioneers, they have to be the ones who drive things forward?
I think it’s a very tough question to answer, but I think it’s even tougher as a brand to actually do that. Having said that, there are many, many ethical people in the world who own brands. Not necessarily in the fashion industry. The fashion industry seems to be lacking in ethical people. Many of them commit crimes and are put in prison, so that doesn’t really give you a great vision of the fashion industry. The same happens in other industries, but in reality, you do have to set out on your own. If you want to change the world as a fashion brand, you can do it by really sticking to your guns, by creating a different narrative and bringing people along with you and setting certain rules.
I think one of the things that has changed in the past 30 years is less child labour. I’m not saying no child labour – there’s still plenty of child labour in footwear, in garment production. There’s a huge amount of slave labour. But there are brands where you can be guaranteed it is slave labour, child labour, cruelty-free product. So that gives you something to look at.
How many people can afford that? You know, another question. How many people are actually going, I saw my favourite actress wearing something similar to that. What’s this company called? Shein, Temu. Yeah, I’ll buy that one. That’s the one that I’ll buy because I’m going to look like my favourite actress or I’m going to look like Taylor Swift wearing that. Or I’m going to look like Justin Bieber or whoever it might be, whoever they want to look like. And I think that is the difficulty. I was asked at Manchester Fashion Week what the key was to making shoppers buy circular. And I said, it’s got to be cheaper and sexier. And people kind of gasped, but it’s the truth. The whole of fashion works on basically only two consumer triggers: price and attraction.
And you can do that. If you are really bright and you know what you’re doing, you can hit both of those and still be ethical and still have a great product. It’s few and far between, but you can do it. And I think that’s what people have got to aim for. If you start off saying, I want to be really ethical, but I’m going to have to charge double the price of my competition, you shouldn’t be in business. That is not how business works. The food industry, the cosmetics industry, they don’t work like that. No industry works like that. And I think that’s where people fall foul because you can see in other industries. And I think personal care and of cosmetics is an industry where we do see well-known brands like Lush, which is worth nearly a billion dollars in revenue, but also the new set of refill deodorants that are taking huge market share. And refill for household care. Again, think about the product. Why do I buy that refill? Because it smells nicer than the Unilever product, because it’s got a better fragrance, it’s got a better taste. I love the packaging, it makes me wanna pick it up. So ultimately, marketing trumps all. Ethos is fabulous, but if you don’t have the right marketing, it won’t work. Marketing also means pricing and distribution. So, you’ve got to have all of that.
A good answer. I think it very much aligns with the conversation I recently had with that menswear brand. There’s a similar question, I think, for the folks who exist upstream, for your tier one manufacturers, your tier two material suppliers and so on. What are the incentives and the ways for them to be part of a more circular business model that doesn’t, by definition, translate into them scaling back their own operations as the volume of new product decreases. Because right now so much of the supply chain is predicated on the idea of high volume orders, consistent reliability, and the idea that the linear model, the linear economy is what works and that’s what these relationships are built on top of.
So many skills and expertise and so many businesses are just built with that as axiomatic with the idea that that’s what works. When we start to think about a circular business model, how can some of those skills as expertise, those upstream businesses, how can they compete, remain relevant when what we’re talking about is more in the way of reshoring, more in the way of localization, less in the way of new product?
I mean, these are conversations that people have been having for a long time. My own circular journey began in packaging and I can happily say now that we are at a point where circular business models are working very strongly within packaging.
But if you think about recycling, paper is 90% recycled as all is metal packaging. Glass packaging is probably around 60-70% recycled in most countries. So, these raw materials are going round and round in packaging. Now, if you look at my own work, I began in footwear. I set up the circular footwear initiative in 2020 when there was no circular footwear in the world. Now I can point to about 20 or 30 brands who are doing it. And each time those brands are getting bigger and bigger and more and more supported. It takes time. It takes lots of conversations. It takes lots of businesses to go bust. You cannot create a new circular business model without lots of failures. So it happened in packaging for a long time.
Businesses that did circular packaging went bust and then suddenly they started to survive because they’d learnt off those errors. I think we’re now getting there in garments and in footwear. And the skills in logistics and merchandising, which you have in linear fashion, you have to apply to circular fashion. It’s the same people, the same skills, but it is something that is a continual conversation.
I’ve had conversations about that last month, both at Manchester Fashion Week and at London Fashion Week. I’m based near Greater Manchester. We have a project to create a circular fashion ecosystem for Greater Manchester. And we’ve had our first meetings at Manchester Metropolitan University, and we’ve now got a whole plan of action. I think we’re working towards the answers.
You don’t really turn around a juggernaut in a few years. It takes 10 to 20 years to turn things around. I think we’re probably in year two of circular fashion, if I’m honest. We’ve got a long way to go.
And that’s a nice segue actually into my final few questions, which are all focused on tools. So when we weigh up everything we talked about so far, it seems clear that whether we’re thinking brands, suppliers, any of the actors in the fashion value chain, the industry needs new tools to achieve anything approaching real circularity. You hinted at tech before, and we’re going to get back to that in a minute. I want to start, though, with what you see happening in the novel materials and manufacturing space to provide some of those tools.
There’s a Congress every year in Dornbirn, a small village in Austria called Global Fiber Congress. And it’s literally everybody in the world who is a professor or some technical whiz in fibres. And by fibres, I mean fibres for paper, fibres for textiles, synthetic fibres for car seats.
It’s a global fibre congress, which is probably the most nerdy gathering in the whole of the planet. It’s hard to beat it. And a professor approached me and said: Paul, I follow you on LinkedIn. I need to tell you this. We have 10 years to turn around what we are doing in fibre. Right now, we are moving towards 100 percent fossil fibre and we need to go back to agrifibres. We need to start using zero emission, rain-fed plant fibres for everything that we do. We need to go back to where we were pre-industrially and we need the biologists and the biochemists to do that science in the next 10 years. And that kind of shook me just incredibly because I thought, well that’s never going to happen. How on earth do we do that? But as I saw what was happening at an EU level there’s two billion euros for this kind of innovation available annually, handed out by CBE JU.
And there’s all this work going on to literally replace all of our fossil chemistry and fossil manufacture with plant-based, non-toxic, safe fibres. And now I’m beginning to see them in the market. So fibres like kapok are coming back. Kapok is a tree that has these seed pods that make a fantastic insulating fiber. It was in the shoes that Sherpa Tenzing wore when he went up Everest. There are rain-fed cottons such as kala, dry farm cotton that grows in drought prone areas. They’re all there. There are even cottons that grow indigo or green or brown that you don’t need to die – we won’t get into dyeing, but there are a lot of emissions in that. So I think in terms of materials, we need to go back to nature. People love nature. So if you talk to customers and businesses about nature, they love it. They hate climate change. That’s a horrible thing. So we began by talking about the ‘nasties’. What people love is nature, regeneration, going back to nature. That sells. It sells into business. It’s a B2B sale. It’s a B2C sale. And that’s where I think we have an opportunity.
And it even includes things like seaweed. Seaweeds are a fantastic fibre source and we know it’s happening in packaging and I’m told it is going to become bigger and bigger in fashion as well.
And then the next bit of the toolkit, software and systems. You mentioned tech earlier on. If you were advising a brand today, and that can be an apparel, footwear, accessories brand, whatever you like. If you’re advising a brand who’s working with a limited budget to invest in technology as part of their circularity or sustainability strategies, where would you be encouraging them to focus so that they would get the most potent near-term return on their investment?
I would say after years of looking at these things on behalf of clients, don’t invest millions in one tech platform, one AI platform, whatever it might be, because it may be redundant in two years time. So my best advice as a non-executive director, as a member of the Institute of Directors is subscription, not purchase. Subscribe to something that you can move out of. Tech goes wrong all the time, it gets surpassed. We were all using Zoom during lockdown and suddenly it’s not good enough anymore.
There’s a whole range of things that we could just jump out of and move on. If we were sticking with the platforms that we started with, we would never be doing what we do today. And I think that is the important thing. You need a good, giant metrics platform. So I’ve spent a lot of time going to conferences on tech for fashion, and there are things that have really caught my eyes. One for using in your factory is called Manny AI and that reduces emissions during manufacturing. Another one that I’ve got involved with more closely because it’s in Manchester is called Circit, which calculates emissions as designers are designing. And there are many others, but I think we have got to the point where fashion tech has become a thing all of its own. It’s become a whole industry, but it’s nascent. It’s still getting going. Understanding how AI works means that – and I’ve explained it to people in lots of different ways in corridors, at conferences and summits – it cuts out so much of the waste and cost of operations. And big brands are seeking it out. They’re Googling to try and find it. And I think that is one of the ways forward. I call it ‘AI for good’. I know people are scared of AI, but they’re clearly not using it.
Well, that’s one that we were comfortable dissecting at the end of the line. We spent a bunch of time on it over the course of this year with the AI report in the springtime. We’ll be doing the same again next year. I’ll tell you what, next year’s AI report, let’s make sure we get an ‘AI for good’ perspective in there because I would tend to align with you on the value there. I know people get very hung up on the sustainability or energy consumption profile of the average AI query, but when you’re being more pragmatic about it, as we were earlier in this conversation, if you counterbalance that with taking out a huge amount of waste, whether that’s time waste, process waste, material waste, and so on, all of a sudden that starts to be an equation that balances out in sustainability’s favour.
Finally, are there any tools, best practices or examples that aren’t captured under the two umbrellas? So the material process innovation and the tech innovation. Are there any particular brands, vendors or even emerging markets that you think of as lighthouses in this area?
I think I’m going to give you a whole industry as a lighthouse, which is the industry I work in, which is footwear. People that work in footwear tend to be incredibly technical. Making footwear is quite hard. If you want to be making footwear, you either need a degree in footwear design, product design, or you need to be an industrial engineer. It’s not like sewing a garment. I go to a summit every year in Alicante called Footwearise, which is literally about the future of footwear. And the future of footwear is not about cut and sew. It’s about injection, molding and 3D printing. And I already own a pair of 3D printed shoes where I scanned my own foot. I have two slightly different sized feet. I’ve got an 8.3 and an 8.7 I think it is. And these shoes fit like a glove.
First time in my life, I have a pair of shoes that are designed for my feet and I will treasure them and I will look after them and they’re 3D printed, so there’s no waste. And that’s where we are going. And we’re going to be injection molding shoes. There are apps, the app I use is called Volumental, but there’s plenty of apps to scan your bare feet and create millimetric sizing.
Footwear is moving really, really quickly. I’m writing a book called The Future of Footwear and I can’t keep up because every week the industry is moving forward. Why? It’s full of tech heads, it’s full of people that are using AI to design and manufacture, and equipment is being built. Not at $20,000 or $30,000 or $50,000 a unit; the latest shoe printer costs $200.
So the price of the tech goes down, the price of the product goes down. So what’s happening in footwear is rapid and dramatic. And the garment industry will need to look at footwearers to create their model of, high speed, on short, fast. Nothing wrong with being fast. Fast doesn’t mean shit. Fast just means fast.
And you know, fast is good. People like fast. When I sit down in front of the TV and I want to watch a film, I want it to be on my screen within 60 seconds. I don’t want to wait a week. Fast is good. And it also makes shoppers think it’s part of the linear economy. The most famous wonderful thing I’ve ever heard was if you want to sell to shoppers, make them think that circular is linear and they will buy it. Absolute gold dust and that’s what footwear is doing. Five years from now we will see total dramatic change in footwear. Adidas and Nike are already into this, trying everything out, trialing, prototyping, collabing. That’s where we’re going to see change. That will be the lighthouse.
Amazing. I do actually have one last question, which is, in your experience of working with companies on circularity, where do they most often get stuck? What are some of the common mindset roadblocks or cost roadblocks or complexity or other areas? And how would you encourage listeners for this show to maybe reframe the way they think about challenges or roadblocks that can feel insurmountable?
I think the problem with brands is that brands set themselves marketing objectives as a brand team and having spent 40 years working with brands, I know how it goes. You have a great creative workshop, the brand team is there, the PR, the advertising and off you go. Whereas in the world of circularity, you start with the supply chain. So in fact, the biggest roadblocks up to now and even now are in the supply chain. Brands were ready to embrace circularity way before the circular supply chain was ready. So it was a disaster. And then CFOs, CEOs were saying, hey, circularity sucks. It doesn’t work. Look at this. We’ve incurred, we have product here and product there and it’s all a disaster. And customers don’t care about circularity. They just want great product. And these failures, these multiple failures of supply chain have allowed the narrative to change to become anti-circularity, which is ridiculous.
Proper circularity makes you more profit.
It saves you money and it saves you headaches. And what we really need is a radical new ecosystem. So as I’ve mentioned, footwear is developing a radical new ecosystem that needs to grow, right across garments, right across accessories. Because once you have really new AI-powered high tech systems where calculations are done by really bright bits of kit, not very upset and stressed and tired humans. Because let me tell you, everyone who works in fashion is tired and stressed. That’s how it is. Then you’re likely to get things more right.
Well, that’s a great place to bring us to a close. Thanks so much for joining this conversation. It’s been fascinating.
My pleasure.
