Patchworked together using deadstock fabric (that was originally made from recycled plastic bottles), our Deadstock (R)evolution™ Bags are pros at putting old trash to new use. To dive deeper into how they’re made, we caught up with UBB’s Associate Accessories Designer, Hannah, to give us the inside scoop on how our trash becomes your treasure.
When we say “deadstock”, what are we referring to?
Deadstock is basically extra fabric left over from previous seasons. Since we work on a slow fashion timeline, there are a lot of predictions that need to be made regarding how much material to buy, and it’s impossible to get it right every time. Instead of letting our deadstock fabric go to waste, we turn it into new bags.
What’s the process like of creating deadstock bags?
We first reach out to our production partners and ask them to send us a list of how much and what color fabric we have available. From there, we can begin to piece together what types of bags we can make and how many. It’s a bit of a numbers game, for example, our water bottle slings only take about one fifth of a yard of fabric to make, while our duffles need over a full yard, so we have to work with what we have. Once we figure out how many bags we can make we can start playing with color combinations.
Tell us more about color!
It’s super fun to play around with different color combinations and see old fabrics come to life in new ways. At the same time, we have to be creative and strategic about what colors we use where, because the goal is always to create as little waste as possible.
Colorblock designs for The Deadstock 9L Sidekick
We rely a lot on our production partners to help with the design phase, too. Sometimes bags start out as one color and wind up as something totally different depending on how we can best use the fabric. It’s all about allocating resources the right way.
Can you talk to the sustainability of using deadstock fabric?
When we say “these bags are trash”, it’s true. It takes 15 plastic bottles to make one yard of our (R)evolution™ fabric – so 100 yards alone is over 1,000 plastic bottles that aren’t going to a landfill. On top of that, whatever we don’t use for a season is considered waste, so it’s great to be able to use that to create something new. What’s sort of ironic is that ideally, there will be fewer and fewer of these bags. As we continue to get better with forecasting our buys and production runs, there will be less deadstock created in the first place.
