How a mistake in production strengthened our values: sustainability and how we deal with mistakes at avonté

When Life Turns Upside Down - Why the little smiling faces suddenly laughed at us

In the fashion industry, much of the work is done by people. That alone is a reason to write an article about it, because far too often this fact disappears into the background.

The fact is that mistakes happen from time to time. That's normal and we all do it. Now and again, however, this is also a problem at first. Because it forces us to rethink and it requires a lot of capacity in stressful situations. And that's what happened to us.

We were put to the test

Our summer collection was in the middle of production at our supplier in Portugal when our values were tested.

What had happened? One of our rescued fabrics has a sophisticated design of smiling little faces woven into a jacquard. The highlight of the collection for us. There were only 103 meters of this leftover fabric. Not very much, but we really wanted to produce a few pyjamas from it, 39 to be precise.

Then it happened: during cutting, the pattern were placed the wrong direction on the fabric and the shirt was cut incorrectly. The smiley faces were upside down. The pattern pieces for the matching shorts had been cut correctly beforehand. So the faces on the shirt and shorts were facing in different directions.

Production was in full swing, so we had to decide straight away: what to do? As we only work with overstock, these are always limited and we had bought the entire remaining quantity. So there was no way to buy new fabric and cut the pieces correctly. Another option was not to produce the shirt, throw away the cutted pieces and only produce the shorts. We briefly considered this option, partly because this is a common consequence in the fashion industry when such a mistake is made - another reason why textile waste is created.

We paused and took the time to walk around the block (we can both usually think better then) and reminded ourselves why we founded avonté: We want to do things differently.

Throwing away perfectly good quality cut fabric just because the faces are upside down - that's not our idea of sustainability at all! We want to make sensible use of existing resources and show that responsible product development is possible.

At the same time, we want to bring good quality products onto the market. Is the shirt any less good now? No. It's not perfect, okay, there's a flaw in the detail that many people probably wouldn't notice.