For those in London this festive season, there's a pop-up shop in Covent Garden worth taking the time to visit. Unmade, as it's called, is tucked down an unimposing side street off the main piazza. Away from the street entertainers and busy Christmas shoppers, it’s a minimal showcase of a knitwear brand currently considered one of London’s most disruptive start-ups.
Sweaters, scarves and a full-sized industrial knitting machine are on display. You can’t walk away with an item there and then, but you can use iPads to design your own and have it made especially for you thereafter.
And that’s the USP. The name "Unmade" comes from the fact no garment is finished until you, the shopper, come and complete it.
Born through frustration at the fashion industry’s stagnant approach to mass-consumption, it’s about bespoke, personalized knitwear, produced on-demand, yet at an industrial scale. Think of it as a 3D printer for fashion, yet using the same machines that make up the $200bn knitwear market worldwide.
Said co-founder and creative director, Ben Alun-Jones: “We have developed a way to control existing industrial knitting machines to make thousands of really unique items of knitwear for the same price as making thousands of pieces that are all the same. We think about the garments as digital products first... As a digital file they are available to be modified and changed. So essentially what we're trying to do is digitize clothing to make something no longer a static fixed product, but a dynamic item that can be changed and shaped to that person.”
Where the traditional industrial knitting machine process needs complicated human input to operate and change patterns for new designs, Unmade is enabled by advanced software that does it automatically and digitally per item.
What that means is the consumer is able to make simple changes to garments ahead of time, without it increasing the cost of production. Colours can be adapted and patterns rearranged by merely dragging a finger across the tablet screens (or cursor on a desktop). On hitting “buy”, items then join a digital queue to be “printed out” by the machine. Better yet, the completed version also has your name stitched into the label.
Alun-Jones is one of three co-founders alongside Kirsty Emery and Hal Watts, who met while studying at London’s Royal College of Arts. Founded in April 2013, Knyttan, as their company behind the Unmade brand is called, has received over £2m (nearly $3m) in seed funding from backers including Connect Ventures, Felix Capital, Farfetch CEO Jose Neves and Zegna’s head of digital Edoardo Zegna.
One of the big focuses for the company is on bringing in outside talent to collaborate on unique collections. Designers and artists including Christopher Ræburn, Kate Moross, Malika Favre and Amsterdam-based interactive design studio Moniker have already worked with the team, bringing this new idea of mass customisation to their own audiences.
As Frédéric Court, founder of Felix Capital, told The Business of Fashion: “Knyttan is a formidable enabler for creative talent to design and produce knitted garments that just couldn't be created before, mainly because of supply chain and design technology limitations. Knyttan opens up new alleys to fashion designers to create new designs and products, especially mini-series that will be attractive to consumers for their uniqueness.”
“We see clothes as a series of parameters. We control some of them and Christopher [Ræburn] has controlled some of them, and we've left one open for the customer to control,” Alun-Jones explains. It’s about a template that consumers can adapt to fit their taste and requirements, he adds. One of Ræburn’s designs for Unmade (as shown above), for instance, features a map of Borneo, which consumers can navigate around until they find their favorite location on the map and then have the garment made including it.
“We love the idea of turning knitwear into a blank canvas - rather than it just being for fashion designers what if we could take editors, bloggers, other artists and give them the opportunity to also ‘publish’ clothes, as we like to call it, how would they approach it?” Alun-Jones asks.
Another important aspect of what the Knyttan / Unmade team is doing is thinking about the lifetime of clothing. Around 10% of all clothes currently made go straight into landfill because of the fact they’re not fit for purpose, Alun-Jones highlights. By being on-demand, there is no waste from Unmade. Furthermore, the belief is that because people have been involved in the process of making the clothing, they’re likely to be more engaged with wanting to wear it for longer.
As a statement from the company reads: “[We] cater to a new generation: an inquisitive society conscious of where and how clothing is manufactured. [We] aim to slow down fast fashion and in turn reclaim the character within our clothing and create considered pieces with a perennial place in both a man and woman’s wardrobe.” The garments are created from high quality extra fine Australian merino wool and Italian-spun cashmere, and retail for £60-£200 (about $90-$300).
Long-term the aim is to make this mass customisation a local option also. Given the industrial knitting machines needed to create the products are in place all around the world, the opportunity is to roll out production to other markets negating the need for international shipping from the brand’s current base in Somerset House in London.
“In the future, we’ll be able to get the best of New York Fashion Week by simply downloading it from the designer and having it made for us in our local shop in France,” explains Alun-Jones.
Indeed, the future of knitwear is, it seems, an opportunity for real-time, on-demand, and most importantly, personalized, fashions.
Unmade is open until December 24 at 12 Floral Street, London WC2, or find it online at Unmade.com. Looking for Christmas presents? You can still give a gift voucher.
