When Jo and I started Our Fashion Fix, stepping back from our roles to look at the industry from above, the first issue we agreed needed tackling was overproduction. Three years on, despite lots of brilliant work on circularity, it is still the elephant in the room. After 25 years in high street buying, we know the old mantra: buy deep, cover every base and let markdowns mop up the excess. Selling out was a crime. Missed sales! But that playbook is outdated.
This spring, Middle East conflict sent oil prices soaring and polyester followed, with Teijin Frontier raising fibre prices by 20% or more. Natural fibres offer no escape either, with climate disruption hitting crops. And switching to "better" fibres isn't the shortcut we hoped for. A study from the Universities of Helsinki and Graz, modelling the global fibre market from 2004 to 2021, found each extra unit of a lower-impact alternative cut competing fibre production by just 0 to 32%. New sustainable volume is mostly added on top, not swapped in.
So can't we simply recycle our way out? Fibre-to-fibre recycling will help ease pressure on virgin materials, but it is costly, small in scale and needs clean, sorted feedstock. It cannot absorb today's volumes, and if it becomes a licence to keep producing, it works against us. Far from weakening the argument, recycling strengthens the case for making less.
WRAP's new report, co-authored by Flourish for the UK Textiles Pact, gives overproduction a formal definition and tracks what happens to unsold stock. It lays bare the hidden costs of high online returns, manufacturing buffers and surplus garments overwhelming secondary networks. Those networks are already buckling: the price charity shops receive for used textiles has crashed from £375 a tonne in January 2024 to just £70 two years later, and in Germany the Red Cross is pulling its clothing banks from an entire district.
Regulation is moving, but slowly. The Or Foundation has spent years urging brands to #SpeakVolumes and disclose how much they produce. In July, the EU ban on destroying unsold clothing and footwear came into force for large companies, and the Circular Fashion Federation is pushing for reduced VAT on repair and resale. EPR schemes are spreading, but do they curb volume or just fund the clean-up? In the UK, textiles EPR legislation still hasn't landed.
Here's my radical question. Why can't we put limits on how much brands and retailers are allowed to produce? Radical, I know, but wicked problems need radical solutions. Brands / Retailers are very good at engineering ranges to agreed profit and sales targets. Almost everyone you speak to in the industry would agree they have promo and markdown fatigue
Resale is booming. Vinted, valued at €8bn this spring, is now France's biggest clothing retailer by volume and ranks third in the UK behind Primark and Next. eBay's 2026 Recommerce Report finds 47% of consumers now buy secondhand at least monthly. Patagonia has merged Worn Wear into its main website so that new and used sit side by side in a single checkout. That's what we need: commercially viable circular business models, not side projects.
But The Observer asks whether the secondhand craze is now fuelling the very overconsumption it was meant to curb. Algorithms tuned to our tastes keep us scrolling, and because sale proceeds sit in the app rather than our bank account, they can feel like free money to spend on more clothes. WRAP's Mark Sumner told the paper that secondhand buyers are often still buying new as well: "If they buy four or five [secondhand], it ultimately displaces one new T-shirt." Vinted, for its part, says 76% of purchases on its platform replaced a new buy last year.
There's a knock-on effect too. Platforms are skimming off the best secondhand stock, leaving charities to sift what's left, just as scores of charity shops have closed this year. A September report for Oxfam found that five kilos of clothing sold through charity shops generated 0.6kg of CO2, against 3.1kg through platforms like Vinted. And because resale filters favour "new with tags" over anything needing a mend, repair, arguably the one thing that can truly slow consumption, gets pushed to the back of the queue. Resale only helps the planet when it replaces a new purchase, not when it adds to the pile.
Which brings us to devaluing of garments – it’s common to find new with tags items selling for a few pounds. What if platforms set a minimum value for them, say 50% of the original price? It's a win-win. Sellers get a fairer return, buyers still get a bargain and charity shops compete on a level playing field. It would also draw a clear line between professional resellers and people simply clearing their wardrobes. Above all, clothing keeps its worth.
Real change starts before a single garment is cut. At Our Fashion Fix, we help brands and retailers buy smarter, plan tighter and build resale, repair and rental into their ranges. Ready to produce less and profit more? Let's talk.