The global fashion industry produces 2.1 billion tonnes of GHG emissions annually – more than aviation & shipping combined.
Worse, 20% of global freshwater pollution is from making clothes. Soon, wars will be fought over water.
About 150 billion garments were produced in the last year. 30% of them will never be worn by a human. Imagine if we drove ⅓ of all the cars ever manufactured directly from the factory to a landfill.
This $1.7TT industry is built on low cost labor in the poorest countries overproducing with speculative manufacturing – creating garments long before finding out if anyone actually wants them.
We’ve backed CreateMe to flip the script. They wait until somebody clicks “buy now” before manufacturing on-demand and shipping out the next day. Using advanced automation, they can produce high quality, low cost garments close to the consumer.
CreateMe is much further along than most of the companies we invest in, but this is an important use of technology that is near and dear to my heart. Before starting Deep Future, I spent years of nights & weekends working on this very problem. CreateMe is taking this vision even further – rearchitecting the industry to bring H&M, Adidas & LVMH into the future, but without the greenwashing. Those are all current customers.
CreateMe already has strong revenue and a world class team developing automation technology that has done it before in electronics and semiconductor. They need talent and will take on their first strategic investors this year – please think about who could be a good match for them and reach out to Michael or I.
