The Thread Union: Kinkos for Clothes

For our thesis, working in a team of 3 students, we spent the semester investigating ways to support small scale fashion designers in their quest to get their collections made and to market. During our research we found that New York City is still the hub of the fashion world, serving as the headquarters to more than 800 fashion-based businesses, twice that of Paris, despite more than 95% of apparel manufacturing moving offshore in the last 40 years.

As a result of that offshore movement, more and more of the more than 22,000 fashion designers in the United States are having difficulty having their clothes made at a reasonable cost. Most offshore manufacturing firms have large minimum requirements, or have questionable quality when it comes to small orders. We saw a New York City based ethical production line as a foil to these large market forces.

Billed as “Kinkos for Clothes,” The Thread Union utilizes technology from large offshore manufacturing plants, such as digital patterns and laser cutting, as well as mass-customization technology, to make the manufacture of 1-1000 pieces affordable and accessible to designers.

The Thread Union provides tools to create, make, edit, produce, manage and sell collections that are eco-efficient, meaningful and authentic. Our online collaboration tools, Collection Capture digitization process, prototyping and sample-making services, and ability to support one-of-a-kind pieces build the backbone to a successful fashion-based business.

The digitization technology breaks the traditional apparel sales model by allowing consumers (both individual and retail) to order only the garments they want from an online showroom, from as little as one piece at a time, up to 1000 pieces. This print-on-demand model is a unique take on apparel manufacturing and helps to minimize the great environmental impact of clothes-making. We save designers money by preventing inventory glut, and save resources by customizing each garment with regard to size.

In addition, we offer a number of community-building components, enabling open-source collaboration between designers. We see the Thread Union serving as a bridge to the future of fashion, where consumers are actually involved in design process.

Pro-forma Profit and Loss statements were used to evaluate potential business models, with the final iteration projecting $6.5 Million in net income over 5 years.

This project was selected to be presented during the inaugural CCA MBA in Design Strategy Venture Show in May 2010.

Full project report available upon request.

Date: Spring 2010
Class: Venture Studio
Contributed to: Secondary Research, Financial Analysis, Ideation, Project Management, Competitive Analysis, Writing