Queen of Raw is a fabric resale platform, generating revenue from deadstock fabrics by matching sellers with buyers. There is estimated to be $120 billion worth of excess fabric populating the world’s warehouses, which will likely either be incinerated or sent to landfill. Using cutting-edge technology, Queen of Raw has expanded into an Excess Inventory Management Solution through its Materia MX platform, helping businesses identify waste in real time and making intelligent predictions to minimise waste going forward. 

Fashion production has a massive waste problem. There is estimated to be $120 billion worth of excess fabric populating the world’s warehouses. Deadstock is the result of leftover fabric scraps from the cutting process, faults or misprints in the material or a company overstating its fabric needs or underselling a product. The impact can be as much as a 15% hit to the annual bottom line and it also has a huge environmental impact. The waste will sit in the factory before being sent to a landfill or incinerated. Due to the traditional working ways of using multiple spreadsheets to manage inventory, brands can have limited knowledge of how much and where waste is being generated. Similarly, while some brands want to source deadstock, it can be challenging to find the right availability to meet lead times. 

Working similarly to peer-to-peer clothing resale platforms, Queen of Raw provides a marketplace to match buyers and sellers of unused fabric. Businesses big and small can buy and sell deadstock, keeping fabric in circulation. Queen of Raw takes a commission on each sale, providing deadstock fabric for fashion and interiors. 

To achieve scale, Queen of Raw is using cutting-edge technology, like machine learning and blockchain, to help businesses identify waste in real time and keep track of key fabric traceability information like origin, composition, and certifications. Queen of Raw has developed Materia MX, a SaaS Excess Inventory Management Solution. Excess inventory is automatically uploaded to the Queen of Raw marketplace, allowing companies to generate profit from their waste. By tracking waste, intelligent predictions are made to brands to help minimise waste going forward and the impact of their activities is displayed through dashboards. 

There is little reporting on tangible outcomes, but as Materia MX is added an impact feature to the platform, this will likely change in the future. To date, Queen of Raw has worked with over 325,000 buyers, in turn saving more than 1 billion gallons of water by keeping fabric out of circulation. Queen of Raw's eventual goal is to improve efficiencies to the extent that the industry will no longer need the platform.

Image by Francois Le Nguyen from Unsplash