Son of a Tailor is a Danish e-commerce and clothing-tech company that produces custom-fitted garments using their innovative waste-reducing manufacturing process. When I say ‘custom-fitted’, I really mean it.
SoaT is not operating on a massive scale, and they don’t have warehouses where they keep their unsold stock. If there’s no order, there’s no garment.
They also don’t have a wide range of clothing compared to most companies in the fashion industry. With their unique approach, Son of a Tailor focuses on only a few products that they offer in a wide variety of each.
A yearly report published by Son of a Tailor on the state of fabric waste as of 2019/2020 states that 140 000 000 tons of fabric was produced in 2019 and 20% (28 000 000 tons) of fabric used in clothing production was left on the floors in the cutting rooms.
Son of a Tailor is one of the companies that wants to tackle this problem.
In the beginning of this year, they ran a Kickstarter campaign dedicated to the launch of their zero waste pullovers line. The campaign was fully funded in 39 minutes, which offers a measure of hope in the approach Son of a Tailor’s has taken and the impact on wasteful production methods it may have in the future.
This philosophy and business strategy was much appreciated by the investors, helping Son of a Tailor close a $7 million Series A investment round.
How do we help reduce waste in the clothing industry?
We started working with Son of a Tailor in 2018, when they were looking to scale their in-house dev team. Since then, we have been continuously working with the ‘Son’ team on the tech side of their business.
The major difference with Son of a Tailor tech-wise is their custom-fitting ML-powered size engine. It only needs a few data points to return the perfect fit measurements.
Once you’ve provided information such as your height, weight, age and shoe size, you are presented with a set of measurements that you can tweak if the engine got something wrong. It doesn’t happen very often as the machine learning engine keeps getting better and better with each and every processed order.
Another important part of the Son of a Tailor success is their clothing creator. It allows shoppers to customize their selected piece of clothing according to their own taste: some products allow more customization, some less, but the user experience is nonetheless sublime.
At RST Software, we love working on projects that, in addition to making a profit, change the way products are manufactured. This way we can indirectly help protect the environment, which is one of the crucial issues of our times. Just like Son of a Tailor did with the clothing industry, another project of ours — Kitche — changed the food-waste industry. You can read more about it here.
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