London, January 2022: Otrium, the end-of-season fashion platform, is bringing Data-Made Fashion to the industry to reduce waste from unsold inventory and excess fabric, and ensure more of the clothes created are bought, reducing waste and pollution.
At the cutting edge, the company is already collaborating with many of its brand partners, which also includes Studio-AR amongst many others, to produce Data-Made Fashion items and is seeing this pioneering part of its business expanding rapidly. Already, a Data-Made Fashion item for Otrium resulted in a best selling item for Alchemist, showing the commercial impact of the approach.
Otrium was designed to solve the fashion industry's unsold inventory challenge by giving fashion brands an online outlet channel and the digital tools to smartly connect their end-of-season collections with fashion lovers. For users, Otrium offers hundreds of designer brands in one app at up to 75% off.
Behind the scenes, Otrium goes to great lengths to ensure that it fulfills its company purpose - the company believes all clothing should be worn. That isn’t the case right now, currently, around 1 in 10 items are never sold, they remain in warehouses and eventually end up in landfills. Working towards a future when all clothing is worn, Otrium goes the extra mile to ensure its brand partners give their unsold items the best chance to find an owner. As well as Data-Made Fashion, Otrium’s technology also :
Smartly matches all inventory on its platform with its community of over 3.5 million fashion lovers. Otrium receives and polishes every item in its warehouses to ensure they are optimal before featuring on the site – which includes product photography, product descriptions, garment pressing, steaming, and new packaging when required.
Repairs and refurbishes returned items that would otherwise never be sold. With around a quarter of all industry-wide e-commerce fashion sales returned, often slightly damaged and unable to be resold as is, Otrium’s refurbishment services are able to solve this with around half of all its returns being restored and sold.
Otrium enables its brand partners to improve their ESG reporting processes and performance by helping brands to be entirely transparent about where their unsold inventory and fabrics are going – and providing them with the data to back this up.
What is Data-Made Fashion
Data-Made Fashion uses data from shoppers to create the clothes they want to wear, reducing waste from unsold inventory and creating fashion lines that don't end up unsold and so won’t ultimately find their way to landfills.
Otrium does this by using its customers' data, with their permission, in the right way. Otrium’s partners are able to create clothes customers want to wear, meaning fashion without excess (colours, sizes, lines etc.) Data-Made Fashion also enables a more efficient use of fabric, meaning less waste from excess material, a significant fashion industry polluter. As a result, Otrium helps brands create fashion that’s meant to be worn by taking the guesswork but not the creative inspiration out of clothing creation.
Otrium believes this is the future for a sustainable fashion industry and across the board fashion will shift towards a more demand-based approach to clothing creation.
About the Alchemist partnership
Otrium has partnered with Alchemist, a Dutch label founded in 2004 by Caroline Mewe, who believes fashion and ethical business practices are equally important. The label creates beautiful clothing that is ethically produced from sustainable materials.
Every year, Alchemist carefully creates two collections. These collections are assembled from designs that are easily mixed and matched with earlier collections, ensuring longevity. They make sure their collections are not only beautiful, but also durable. Also built to be worn through different seasons, the focus of the collections isn’t on following fast-moving trends but on high-quality designs that fit well.
For the partnership with Alchemist, the team worked with excess fabrics. The data insights Otrium provided showed Alchemist which styles are most popular with customers. This way, the team has been able to produce a lead item from overstock fabric. The item, the Dollma top in dark chocolate, has proven to be amongst the brand’s best-sellers, and the brand is now planning on a new Data-Made range for Spring ‘22.
Says Milan Daniels, co-CEO & co-founder of Otrium
“Creating Data-Made Fashion items with Otrium means that instead of being optimistic based on a gut feel, brands can be realistic, informed by the data. At Otrium we’re committed to creating long term positive impact and value with Data-Made Fashion that paves the way to a future without excess inventory altogether. “
Alchemist founder, Caroline Mewe, says;
“With Otrium, we combined leftover fabric from some popular items and their data insights to create one of our best-selling styles – our top Dollma top. Because our supplier already had the pattern and fabric in stock, they were able to quickly make the fabric into a beautiful item, which has sold incredibly well. We’re now planning on combining Otrium’s data with our designs and beautiful fabrics to expand our Data-Made Fashion range later in Spring 2022.”