Each shirt is printed in the seconds after your order, then shipped direct from the factory. Zero deadstock. Zero waste between you and the press.
Around 30% of all clothing produced is never sold. That's roughly 30 billion garments — burned, dumped, or quietly destroyed every year. Our shirts solve this problem by simply not existing until you order them.
The forecasting trap
Conventional fashion runs on prediction. Brands look at last season’s sell-through, this season’s runway trends, and the last six weeks of social media search data, and they place an order with a factory — six months in advance, in tens of thousands of units, in 18 sizes and 12 colours.
When the season ends, whatever hasn’t sold is deadstock. Deadstock has a market value: roughly $120 billion globally, according to the Sustainable Apparel Coalition. The brands that own it have three options:
- Discount it heavily (which trains customers to wait for sales)
- Ship it to outlet channels and secondary markets (which absorbs the loss but dilutes the brand)
- Destroy it — burn, shred, or bury
Burberry was caught burning €28.6 million of unsold stock in 2018, claiming it was to “protect brand value.” H&M was found to have been burning 12 tonnes of clothing a year since 2013. They’re not outliers. They’re the rule, slightly more visible.
Across the industry, around 20–30% of all clothing produced is never worn — somewhere between 20 and 30 billion garments a year.
of all clothing produced is never sold — about 30 billion garments a year, much of it destroyed unworn
A different starting point
Print on demand starts from the opposite premise: don’t make anything until someone wants it. No forecasting. No warehouse. No deadstock.
When you click buy on a shirt, here’s what physically happens:
- The order lands at the factory in India.
- A robot picks the right blank shirt from the appropriate size bin.
- A digital printer lays the ink — no screens, no setup time, no minimum run.
- The shirt is folded, packed, and labelled — direct from the factory floor.
- It ships to you. No warehouse stopover. No middleman shelf.
End to end, the average is a few days. That’s not “fast fashion” speed — that’s just the absence of all the waste in between.
The crucial property of this model: the unit economics work for one shirt as well as for a thousand. A counter-themed design that twelve people want is exactly as viable as a design a million people want. Catalogue depth becomes free; the financial risk of designing something niche becomes zero.
Why this matters at industry scale
The fashion industry produced around 132 million tonnes of new material in 2024 — a record, growing about 6% per year according to the Textile Exchange’s annual benchmark. The single biggest driver of that growth is overproduction: garments made on speculation, often never worn.
By definition, a print-on-demand supply chain can’t overproduce. The chain produces exactly as much as people order, and not one shirt more.
What that means in practice:
- Zero deadstock — the supply chain has no way to make a shirt no one wants
- Zero markdowns — discounting only exists to clear stock that doesn’t exist here
- Zero pressure to design conservatively — every idea is economically viable, even niche ones
It also means we can show you exactly what your shirt cost the planet, because the chain is short enough to count. From cotton seed to your doorstep, the path is auditable.
units of deadstock a print-on-demand model can produce — the supply chain has no way to make a shirt no one wants
