What exactly is “deadstock?”
You might be asking yourself what deadstock is. Well, it’s a word used to describe the materials that were leftover in the process of manufacturing something. Why aren’t they used? In the case of knitwear, maybe there are several colors in the item and one color ran out. Or maybe one of the colors had some fallout (like a flaw) and so the other colors had excess. Maybe someone saw a reduction in sales and cut their order last minute. Maybe the person on the manufacturing side made a mistake when processing. After all, the process is filled with lots of humans, the chain is long, and human error is a reality. It’s not always on purpose, but it doesn’t change the fact that leftovers happen, for whatever reason.
What happens with deadstock yarn?
Typically it gets stored for a long time while manufacturers make meager attempts to sell it or reuse it. But buying limited stock is hard! What if a brand’s sweater design calls for equal parts of 4 colors? Finding enough in those 4 colors is tricky, then of course they won’t all be the same amounts, so smaller amounts will still be leftover. And getting the supplier to show you the colors is usually a long process since that is not their main business or priority.
If stored too long, even great materials can go bad, and in that case, they usually get sent to a landfill. At The Endery, we hand source the best yarns before that happens. By creating a new product from already existing (deadstock) yarn, both water and energy are saved. This is also part of a circular fashion system, which injects those leftovers back into the cycle, preventing them from being wasted.
At The Endery, we are passionate about deadstock design because we’ve seen leftovers accumulate in real time, right here in our workshop. Figuring out what to do with them was a big part of how The Endery was born and our mission to contribute to the circular fashion movement to make fashion more and more sustainable. Join us in going sustainably circular by wearing one of our designs. As they say, waste isn’t waste until it’s wasted.
