The Future of Fashion is Smarter Casual: Better for People and Planet

Fashion is drowning in oversupply which is both bad business and environmentally catastrophic. Two out of three garments produced annually end up in landfill within 12 months, unsold or worn just once. That’s over 60 Billion pieces of clothing that shouldn’t be made. Every. Single. Year. Clothing made custom for every body is the answer, but the traditional process of tailoring is time consuming and expensive. Our challenge was thus twofold: firstly, get accurate body measures online without needing to be physically measured and secondly, create a single-piece production factory to make custom casual clothes efficiently at scale.

We spent 18 months measuring thousands of people by hand and manually cutting every Tee. Our goal was to both build a significant data set and also to understand exactly where technology might help before writing a single line of code. Today our Magic Fit™ algorithm creates a 95% accurate estimate of your body measurements instantly based on simple biometric data that everyone knows: height, weight, age and bra size (for women). We use those measures to dynamically create a unique laser cut pattern in 90 seconds before being ethically sewn in our purpose built factory in St Peters.

Poor fit is the root cause of the two biggest challenges in fashion: over supply and insane ecommerce return rates. Our proprietary technology elegantly eliminates both by making clothes on-demand and custom for every body. As a result our refund rate is 0.2% (yes, zero point two!) vs 30% industry average. We hold no stock, never go on sale and so never need to landfill whatever doesn’t sell. We only use natural fibres, offer free repairs for life and turn our offcut scraps into the ‘Zero Waste Tote’ to ensure we tread as lightly as possible on the planet.

Citizen Wolf is Ethical Clothing Australia (ECA) accredited which ensures everyone gets paid fairly and we’re working on B-Corp certification. We also source fabric from ECA accredited mills in Melbourne because we believe in keeping and creating jobs here in Australia throughout the supply chain. When you buy a Citizen Wolf Tee you choose your style and pick your favourite fabric. When you’re involved in the creation of something you have a much deeper emotional connection to it. And when you love something you use it more and repair it rather than rush to replace it. Which is why we offer free repairs for life on all our Tees. Because the longer we wear the clothes we already own, the better it is for the planet and, for every 9 months we do that, we reduce their environmental impact (water and carbon) by up to 30%. Finally we’ve consciously designed a modular system within the factory so that we can iterate the manufacturing process to be faster as new technologies like sewbots become accessible. Our goal is to continually reduce price to drive on-demand tailoring as a viable alternative to mass production.