Unfolded closes £1.2m pre-seed round to build out a new sustainable fashion platform
Edinburgh based start-up, Unfolded, has closed a £1.2m pre-seed round to develop it’s unique sustainable fashion platform enabling brands to design, sell and fulfill collections of clothing with significantly reduced waste and lower returns than traditional fashion.
Investors in the round:
The round was led by Techstart Ventures and had a wider group of co-investors including Solid Bond, FJ Labs, Sweetspot capital and Pareto Holdings.
What Unfolded Does and Why Solid Bond Invested:
The fashion industry is one of the most wasteful and largest polluting industries. Up to 30% of all garments made are never sold, with many ending up in landfill. Unfolded is addressing the issue of waste in the industry by designing clothes people want to wear. They take communities through their own process whereby the community designs the collections and only when their clothes start selling do they make to order, removing the issue of over production from the process.
Removing the cost of waste from the process allows Unfolded to pay higher wages to garment workers, invest in the local communities around the factories and do so profitably – a win on all sides.
Multiple recent consumer trends really support the growth that Unfolded has seen to date through selling it’s own branded “This is Unfolded”, of which we would expect to see continue to grow. Customers are becoming more conscious buyers, paying more attention to the impacts their clothing are having on the planet and as such there is a building trend of a move away from fast fashion.
Solid Bond invested because it is clear that the model the Unfolded team have built will be able to meet the needs of the increasingly conscious buyer and have already delivered on a far more sustainable way to shop. In selling their own brand, Unfolded is building a valuable platform which will enable other brands to engage with their communities to design collections, provide the ecommerce front to sell and then line up all the logistics to create and fulfil orders. A unique platform which will enable brands large and small to offer more sustainable fashion at scale.
The Unfolded teams background position them well to be able to build and deliver this platform. The team founded Mallzee Insights, a insights company helping larger brands test which styles and types of clothing resonated with consumers and Lost Stock, a platform which took cancelled orders left with the garment manufacturers and packaged them up for sale to consumers in mystery boxes.
Solid Bond sees the Unfolded platform becoming a widespread solution for brands to becoming more sustainable and meeting the demands of a changing consumer and have every confidence in the team behind the business to be able to execute on their plan.
