As the start-ups come with newer and more fantastic ideas, they find it easy to make a new brand name. For all those who are in London, visit the pop-up shop in Covent Garden. The shop is named Unmade. It is not like those regular stores that hop around the streets. It is minimalistic display of a knitwear brand and is currently considered as one of the most revolutionary start-ups. And what is making them unique is their approach. It is not your regular sweater store. There is a full-sized industrial knitting machine on display and the customer cannot walk away with an item then and there. Instead, there is an option to use iPads to design your own clothes. And that is the undisputed USP. They justify their name ‘Unmade’ as no garment is complete until the shopper comes and completes it.
A new approach by the founders of Unmade
‘Unmade’ takes against the stagnant approach of the fashion industry since it is against the prevalent mass-production. It wants to encourage personalized knitwear and produce on-demand clothes at an industrial scale. Co-founder Ben Alun-Jones said, “We have developed a way to control existing industrial knitting machines to make thousands of really unique items of knitwear for the same price as making thousands of pieces that are all the same. We think about the garments as digital products first. As a digital file they are available to be modified and changed. So essentially what we’re trying to do is digitize clothing to make something no longer a static fixed product, but a dynamic item that can be changed and shaped to that person.”
Unmade is co-founded by Kirsty Emery and Hal Watts along with Ben Alun-Jones. They are trying to adapt the essence of traditional knitting to the new advanced technology. Unmade is enabled by advanced software. Consumers can make changes to garments way before time without adding to the cost of production. It would be easy to adapt colors and re-arrange patterns. All you need to do is use the tablet and drag the fingers across the tablet screens. Once you are done, hit on buy and you will get a print. The best part is that the completed version will have your name stitched into the label.
Ideas to change the way fashion industry works
Alun-Jones further explains, “We see clothes as a series of parameters. We control some of them and Christopher [Ræburn] has controlled some of them, and we’ve left one open for the customer to control. It’s about a template that consumers can adapt to fit their taste and requirements. We love the idea of turning knitwear into a blank canvas – rather than it just being for fashion designers what if we could take editors, bloggers, and other artists and give them the opportunity to also ‘publish’ clothes, as we like to call it, how would they approach it?”
The company also believes that there will be no waste from Unmade. As people will be involved with the process, they will be wearing it for longer. “[We] cater to a new generation: an inquisitive society conscious of where and how clothing is manufactured. [We] aim to slow down fast fashion and in turn reclaim the character within our clothing and create considered pieces with a perennial place in both a man and woman’s wardrobe”, reads a statement from the company.
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