So, where exactly does it all go?

Before I started this project to collect New Yorkers’ old sweaters and re-knit them, I wanted to learn more about the system I’d be plugging in to. I wanted to follow the thread (heh) and see our old clothes’ journey firsthand.

At a high level, there are four main phases our old clothes goes through when we’re done with them:

• Disposal

• Collection & Aggregation

• Sorting

• Downstream (re)Use Cases

I spent the last few weeks interviewing, volunteering, and touring, so that I could A) source materials for my project, and B) report back here! And before I jump in, a huge shout out & thank you to , who gave me a very helpful lay of the land…!

Disposal

85% of textiles go into the trash - aka straight to landfill. This stat includes both business & household waste

• The US does not (yet) require businesses to recycle their textile waste - but many EU countries are starting to!

• Obviously we don’t have a consumer textile recycling requirement. Many places in the US still don’t even require recycling cans, glass, or cardboard!! :(

But that 15% that isn’t sent to the landfill? It goes a lot of places. Maybe you:

• Resold it

  • on Ebay, Depop, ThreadUp, TheRealReal, to a vintage or consignment store, etc.

• Donated it

  • at a clothing drive, clothing swap, to a ‘buy nothing’ group, on your stoop!

  • to a thrift store like Goodwill, Housing Works, or a more local spot.

• Dropped it*

  • at an NYC Greenmarket.

  • in a textile recycling collection bin (e.g. in your building or in the wild). Over 2,000 buildings in NYC have a bin.

  • at an official DSNY community collection event - these are hosted by LES Ecology Center, in every Community Board district in NYC, and generally collect both e-waste and textiles!

*Referencing NYC-specific sites, I’m sure this looks a little different from city to city…

Here's a handy map of textile donation / drop-off locations in NYC

A few weeks ago, I met & interviewed Kyndal Coleman, the Program Coordinator for the Community Recycling Program @ LES Ecology Center. She gave me the rundown of their recycling events, sharing that they sometimes see 8,000 lbs of clothes in just 4 hours…!

After our chat, I volunteered at their recent Forest Hills collection event and snagged ~20 sweaters. We didn’t get 8,000 lbs, but still the volume of clothing & e-waste donations was pretty staggering. I’ll be back for more events in September / October!

Collection & Aggregation

So you’ve handed off your old clothes… now what??

In general, thrift stores:

• Sort in-house and resell everything they can!

• If they’re drowning in donations, sometimes they will sell off ‘pre-sorted’ clothes to other collectors & aggregators…

• And the stuff they don’t end up reselling to consumers? That gets sold off to other collectors & aggregators too.

In NYC specifically:

• Greenmarket donation sites are run by Wearable Collections (a collector) and the clothes are sold to a regional collection & sorting company.

• Official DSNY collection bins & collection from events are managed by Helpsy, another clothing collection / aggregation / sorting company.

Last week, I traveled to Eatontown, NJ to meet Dave Milliner, the COO @ Helpsy. Helpsy is a clothing collector, aggregator, and sorter, with a mission to keep clothes out of the trash and to create honorable work.

Dave gave me an overview of the company & a tour of their operation.

In this business of collecting, aggregating, and sorting, there are two main categories of post-consumer textiles

• Credential - straight from the consumer, still in the bag you donated it in.

• Thrift - already sorted, e.g. clothes that thrift stores didn’t / couldn’t sell back to consumers and are now selling to downstream collectors / aggregators / sorters.

Note that Collectors & Aggregators are paying for the donations they collect, either by paying for the collection site (e.g. greenmarket stalls, clothing bins on privately owned space) or by owning the contract to collect from the city via events & residential / building bins.

Credential is worth more than thrift, because it’s untouched / unsorted and therefore still contains the gems & good stuff that can easily be resold.

Collectors & aggregators are essentially bundling, rebundling, and reselling downstream to their customers - resellers, other collectors / aggregators, sorters, and downcyclers. This could look like:

• Helpsy collecting ‘credential’ from bins / events → sorting & selling to resellers, or baling and reselling to thrift chains, stores, individual resellers, sorters, etc.

• Or a thrift chain selling ‘thrift’ downstream to Helpsy, who then bales and sells downstream, etc.

As you could imagine, margins in this business are very, very slim. Despite high supply and high demand, it can be hard to generate enough profit to reinvest in capital expenditures like conveyor belts, and / or other expensive tech. As much as possible, the goal is to keep things out of the trash. Even plastic bags get baled and sold to a company that makes recycled decking.

Dave was excited about a recent project to swap Helpsy’s fleet of diesel trucks for EVs, because it aligns with their mission AND saves money. Freight is a major cost for clothing collectors & aggregators, as they drive up and down the region to collect literal tons of clothes.

Sorting

Sorting materials out into discrete categories for resale is of course more labor-intensive and therefore more expensive than selling credential & thrift in bulk. But sorted goods retain higher value - and therefore can be priced higher too.

There is agreement in the textile circularity / recycling community: the more sorting we can do, the more items we can keep in circulation for longer. The more sorting done at every step of the process, the better - when we sort, more value is retained all the way down the chain.

At Helpsy, clothes are first ‘pre-sorted’, to separate out damaged and unresellable goods, and then individually inspected, imaged, and sorted into small bundles that were specified / ordered by resellers. They are constantly testing & iterating on the sorting process & categories to find the most valuable product mix for their customers and prospective customers.

Sorting can start with us as individuals / consumers! When I clean out my closet, I like to separate things out into these categories:

• Resell (e.g. to my local consignment store or TheRealReal)

• Give to friends

• Donate to a local consignment / charity shop (eg Housing Works!!)

• Drop at a collection / recycling event

Downstream (re)use Cases

The best case scenario is when stuff goes into resale / reuse. Good quality stuff (valued brands, valued materials) is much more likely to stay in circulation. Collectors, aggregators, and sorters make the most money off of this.

When damaged / unresellable stuff gets pulled out @ the aggregation & sorting stages, some of that gets sold off for downcycling, e.g. turned into:

• Rags

• Fill / insulation / shoddy

Along the chain, the collectors & aggregators, and sorters don’t really want to throw stuff in the trash → landfill, because everyone wants to make $$ from it! And sending to the trash is the least desirable outcome not just environmentally but also financially. But the lowest quality stuff does eventually end up somewhere. Landfill, or overseas…

At this point you might be wondering, how do our old clothes end up overseas, in Accra and the Atacama Desert? And why?

Generally, buyers in these countries are buying the cheapest bales, the bales of thrift that have already been picked over. And over the last 10-20 years, the quality of the clothes in these bales has decreased dramatically, as our consumption of low quality fast fashion has exploded.

There are a lot of global & colonial forces that lead to our trash clothes ending up in other countries. Cynthia wrote a good post about this a few years back, contextualizing the clothing waste in Chile as an example:

If you’re not familiar already, I recommend following / supporting the Or Foundation - a non-profit based in Accra, Ghana, working on circularity initiatives in solidarity with Kantamanto (the largest secondhand clothing market in the world).

And what about Textile to Textile recycling?

It exists, but it’s still very very small! There are two main types of T2T recycling:

• Mechanical recycling: shredding, then respinning

• Chemical recycling: chemical treatment to deconstruct & separate, then respinning

These processes are very dependent on the quality of input materials. It’s easier to control for input when working with pre-consumer waste (left over fabric, yarn, etc. from the manufacturing process), but there are some companies experimenting with sorting out & recycling post consumer waste too.

There’s definitely opportunity for innovation & growth in this space - but it does at the end of the day still depend on sorting!! This topic deserves a whole other post…

Ok - I’m impressed if you’ve read this far!!! I wanted to end with some actionable advice, the things we can do as individuals, to become better players in this system.

The most important things you can do to reduce your textile waste?

• BUY LESS, buy better, wear longer

• When you’re done with something → resell or donate to somewhere with the highest likelihood of reuse:

  • give it to a friend directly!

  • Or to someone in a buy nothing group!

  • Donate to a local reuse / thrift store

• Educate yourself & others, and advocate for change! E.g. regulating fast fashion, requiring brands to recycle their textiles, support local, small businesses, etc.

Lastly, if you’re in NYC and want to donate your old sweaters to my project, shoot me an email or message here :)

September is a busy busy month in NYC - I consider Labor Day Weekend our true ‘new year’. In the sustainable / circular fashion world we’ve got events spanning NYFW, Climate Week, and New York Textile Month.

I’ve listed a bunch here, but it’s possible I’ve missed some! Please do let me know of any events I missed in the comments.

As always, I prioritize on ‘hands on’ type workshops and events here (vs the panels / talks etc. of Climate Week). Will definitely reshare any guides to Fashion <> Climate week talks I come across :)

Repair Remix & Rewear: September

💚 = events Next Season is hosting / supporting
🍬 = budget-friendly events ($15 and under)

This month in NYC (& virtual)

• 9/8 - Clothing Repair with Black Girls Sew - 6pm (Lower East Side, Manhattan)

• 9/9 - Mending Club @ Lagoon - 6pm (Bed-Stuy, Brooklyn)

• 9/10 - 🍬 Summer Style Sip & Swap Networking Mixer and Fireside Chat - 6:30pm (Midtown, Manhattan)

• 9/12 - ATELIER MIRONI Sewing, Darning, and Repair Class - 12:30pm (Boerum Hill, Brooklyn)

• 9/12 - Pre-Climate Week NYC Clothing Swap - 5pm (Flatiron, Manhattan)

• 9/12 - Natural Bundle Dye Workshop @ Brooklyn Craft Company - 4pm (Greenpoint, Brooklyn)

• 9/12 - Brooklyn Creative Reuse Mending Circle - 6pm (Sunset Park, Brooklyn)

• 9/13 - “Life’s rough, but at least your hem is even.” Workshop - 10am (Downtown Brooklyn)

• 9/13 - On The Mend 101: Learn how to hand-sew your tears & holes w/ - 10am (Long Island City, Queens)

• 9/15 - JRAT QVC (NYFW SS27) w/ - 4pm (Williamsburg, Brooklyn)

• 9/17 - 🍬 From Soil to Spool: A Tour of FIT’s Rooftop Natural Dye Garden and Weaving and Knitting Labs - 5:30pm (Chelsea, Manhattan)

• 9/18 - 9/20 - Hemp Farm to Fabric - History and Future Summit - (Multiple Locations)

• 9/19 - Upcycling with Blockprinting w/ Cynthia Director Studio - 9:30am OR 2pm (Chelsea, Manhattan)

• 9/19 - Carbon Farm Tour w/ Faraway Farm Alpacas - 1pm (Yorktown Heights, New York)

• 9/20 - “Life’s rough, but at least your hem is even.” Workshop - 10am (Long Island City, Queens)

• 9/20 - On The Mend 101: Learn how to hand-sew your tears & holes w/ - 10am (Downtown Brooklyn)

• 9/20 - 🍬 September Clothing Swap @ St John’s - 11:30am (Greenpoint, Brooklyn)

• 9/20 - Re Fashion Workshop w/ Maria Paula Rennis - 3pm (Park Slope, Brooklyn)

• 9/23 - Rethinking Textiles in an Age of Waste w/ Larissa Zemke - 3:30pm (Online)

• 9/26 - ♻️ SwapClubNyc Monthly Clothing Swap ♻️ - 12 noon (Bushwick, Brooklyn)

• 9/27 - Repair Cafe Brooklyn - 10am (Crown Heights, Brooklyn)

• 9/27 - M.PATMOS X Miron Kiselov Expressive Repair Workshop - 12 noon (Boerum Hill, Brooklyn)

• 9/30 - Hand Mending - Darning w/ - 6:30pm (Long Island City, Queens)

• Multiple dates - Silkscreen Collage & Silkscreen Studio @ Atelier Jolie (Manhattan)

• Multiple dates - 🍬 Mending Circle @ Knitty City (Manhattan)

• Multiple dates - 🍬 Monday Maker Night @ Brooklyn General Store (Brooklyn)

• Multiple dates - Visible Mending Workshop: Denim Upcycling with The Hoop (Manhattan)

If you’re hosting / aware of an NYC-based or virtual event dedicated to repairing / mending, upcycling, or rewearing your clothes, please reach out - I’d love to include it in this weekly roundup!

I was beginning to conceptualize a fall collection and I worried: how can I lower the cost of ‘buying in’ to Next Season when the prices for our (local! handmade!) pieces are necessarily high?

The resources I share here (and on IG), guidance for people to DIY their own repair and remixing, are a part of the answer. Inclusive ways for people to support our mission.

Still I wondered, how could I encourage more participation in circularity and upcycling? What’s another investment someone could make that’s smaller & easier than buying an expensive upcycled piece?

One morning in March, the campaign rose to the front of my mind, fully formed. A call to action:

New Yorkers, donate your sweaters and follow along as they get remade into something “new”.

We could crowdsource our materials. We could tap into the NYC textile recycling ecosystem. We could make a map of the donations we would receive, tracing the materials flowing into this new collection. This collection that was already NYC-themed…! It was meant to be!

NYC Waste Collection: The Vision

A collection of knitted fashion & home goods for Fall 2026, made with reclaimed materials sourced from our greater NYC community.

I’ve mentally categorized the project into three main ‘workstreams’

1. Plugging into NYC’s textile recycling ecosystem

   1. sourcing materials to upcycle, and

   2. mapping the material flows

2. Designing and producing the knitwear collection

3. Documenting and sharing

   1. How NYC handles textile waste, and

   2. the unfolding of this project

It’s a lot… 😅

Thankfully, I’m not doing it alone. I have a couple of key collaborators & supporters (and hopefully / likely more as the project grows):

• My brother, Michael - an interior designer living here in the city. Last year he planted the seed for developing some knitted home goods (pillows, throws), and agreed to work with me on this project.

• Next Season Intern, Annie - Annie recently graduated from Parsons w/ her MFA in Textiles. She’s been working with me @ Next Season for over a year now(!) & is supporting on all things swatching, sampling, and production.

• My network / community of textile recycling experts - they are helping me plug into the NYC-specific recycling ecosystem (shout out to , , Sharon Silbermann, and Mary Beth McDermott so far 🫶)

When I officially kicked this project off last month, I wrote a rough outline of my ‘knowns’ and ‘unknowns’, shared below. I’m sure I’ll run into some unknown unknowns too…

The things I (mostly) know going in

• Inspiration: Michael and I aligned early on a New York-centric theme for the fall collection, even before I had the idea to collect donations and create a map. He’s been taking the lead on the design language for the project (more on this soon!), inspired by a couple of our shared interests: urban planning / city infrastructure and modern art.

• Product assortment: Per Michael’s suggestion, I’d been planning to explore home goods (pillows, throws) as a part of the fall collection. And earlier this year I designed a new sweater pattern I liked and have been meaning to replicate. And and we’ll likely do a vest too, to round things out. Overall looking at 1 sweater style, 1 vest, 2-3 pillow styles, maybe a throw.

• Documentation: I figured this project would be my chance to begin integrating into the greater NYC textile recycling ecosystem (vs ad hoc buying old sweaters at my local Goodwill and Big Reuse). And along with that, I thought it’d be cool to use the project as a vehicle for sharing all of the great textile recycling work that’s already happening here!

The biggest challenges I foresee

aka the things keeping me up at night!!!

• Materials: What sorts of materials will we get? And, can we design a collection without having all of our materials in hand, up front? Will our tests & samples translate to production?

• Storytelling: How do I frame the story & present all of these pieces in a way that does the project justice? There’s a lot to cover, and I really want to nail the storytelling (especially the short form video content - it’s a skillset I want to improve).

How it’s going so far!

We’ve covered a lot of ground already in the past few weeks. Of course I always feel like things could be moving faster, but I doubt I’ll feel that same way in September (aka the busiest month of the year here in NYC, imo)…

Workstream 1: Plugging into NYC’s textile recycling ecosystem

inc. sourcing materials to upcycle and mapping the material flows

• On Saturday I hosted a little sweater donation ‘popup’ at my local (low waste!) coffee shop, IXV coffee. IXV owner Jenny (a former fashion & knitwear designer!!) graciously offered free coffee in exchange for donations :) we’ll be back, stay tuned!

• On Sunday I volunteered at a community recycling event for e-waste and textiles (organized by LES Ecology Center & supported by Helpsy) in Forest Hills. We had nearly 150 attendees in 4 hours! I plucked a bunch of upcycle-able sweaters out of the pile.

  • See bottom of email for upcoming recycling events around the city!

• In progress / to do:

  • Material source mapping, more donation / collection events, explore sourcing directly from sorters.

Workstream 2: Designing and producing the knitwear collection

• Michael put together an initial visual / design language for the collection, inspired by NYC (specifically the subway system), and modern art. We popped into MoMa on Friday, and are actively iterating on translating our inspiration into product designs & knitting patterns.

• From the start, I wanted to experiment with knitweave - a special technique that combines both knitting and weaving and can be achieved with our domestic knitting machines. I think it can be a way for us to design with interchangeability in mind (will do a deeper dive on this in coming weeks).

• Despite not having our official materials in hand, Annie and I have started swatching and sampling with the existing reclaimed yarns we have in the studio.

• In progress / to do:

  • More sampling, refining designs

  • Prep for production, inc. cleaning & unraveling our donated sweaters

Workstream 3: Documenting & sharing

inc. how NYC handles textile waste and the unfolding of this project

• Video content (primarily for Instagram) is a big part of the project. I’ve created and posted some videos already, intro-ing the project. You can follow along here: https://www.instagram.com/nextseason.nyc/

• In progress / to do:

  • Working on a ‘how NYC handles textile waste series’ as a part of the overall project

    • Interviewing experts

    • Volunteering @ and documenting collection events

    • Touring sorting facilities (fingers crossed!)

  • More experimenting required to find a format that works, I.e. that ‘hooks’ new followers :)

Want to get involved?

NYC-ers: you can donate your old, damaged sweaters to the project!

• I’m primarily looking for mid-weight knits at the moment (attached some photo examples at the bottom of the email, for reference).

• Preferably items with damage and / or low resale value (if it’s in good condition and or a high-end brand, best to try to keep in circulation vs breaking it down).

• Send me a DM or email here to coordinate…!

General resources for donating & recycling your old textiles / clothes in NYC:

• DonateNYC - map / catalog of places you can donate items in NYC

• Textile Recycling Collection Event Calendar - LES Ecology Center hosts events all over the city (at least one in every community board througout the year!)

• Textile Recycling w/ Wearable Collections @ GrowNYC Greenmarkets - drop off your unwanted clothes / textiles at one of these farmers’ market locations, most weekends throughout the year

Per above, some examples of the types of knits I’m looking for, for reference:

Ok that’s a loooooot of ground covered. More deeper dives coming soon 🌞

There was a notable generational divide amongst my affected colleagues - I worked with a woman who’d lived the dot com bubble, surviving through 19!!! rounds of layoffs by her employer at the time. But this was a new experience for us millennials who’d been sold on the tech industry as a safe and stable career path.

I learned firsthand how larger economic trends (e.g. interest rates) affect the industry, and naturally became more skeptical about the stability of working at a tech company. Even blue chip companies were laying off swaths of people (and continue to do so, now under the guise of AI).

And climate tech, an area I was hoping to pivot towards, looked to be an even more volatile subsection of the broader industry.

As a part of my career pivot ‘discovery’ period in late 2023, I attended some climate tech fundraising & financing talks (in addition to sustainable fashion events) to get a more holistic understanding of the ecosystem.

I was particularly curious to learn about financing for climate startups with higher marginal costs - aka startups building physical products, materials, and ‘hard’ tech.

Not surprisingly, funding for climate tech is even more complicated and even harder to come by than for software, often requiring a strategic ‘stack’ of sources, from grants to angel, venture, project financing, etc.

While I was compelled to find a job in climate tech (they felt significantly more purpose-oriented than designing frictionless shopping experiences…), I could see that the space was less established, more subject to external factors (e.g. politics), and overall more financially risky.

I met a lot of passionate people and we shared similar concerns about job security and paths to success in this space. It made me wonder, was there a way to de-risk this career pivot into climate x tech x fashion?

Last week I wrote about my path to the perfect (for me) startup idea: turning my sweater unraveling project into a circular fashion company.

But I had a sticky set of questions to consider. How would I fund this project…

• that would take time to evolve and grow?

• that was unlikely to generate a lot of revenue anytime soon?

• that was not (and still is not, at least for now) a good candidate for external funding / financing?

Around the time I started this newsletter, I came across ‘s newsletter writing about portfolio careers:

Anna Mack's Stack

Saying goodbye to "traditional" work, and why I'm building a portfolio career instead.

I’m the queen of the career pivot. I’ve gone from attempting to become a spy, to launching global retail brands in new markets, to creating an award-winning business podcast, to working with some of the most exciting startups across Australia and the US…

Read more

2 years ago · 330 likes · 102 comments · Anna Mackenzie

Her definition resonated immediately:

A portfolio career is defined as having several part-time jobs or multiple income streams rather than one full-time gig. In my mind, it has two defining characteristics:

• It involves pursuing multiple passions, interests and types of work

• It’s never static and always evolving

I realized, I was already sort of doing this… albeit unintentionally!

In the period following my layoff, I started volunteering (and eventually freelancing) as an avenue to meet new people and learn more about sustainable materials. And as my job search tapered off, I was glad to start earning at least a little bit of money as my severance package dwindled.

I realized this portfolio career mindset could be the answer to both of my questions. Earning income through multiple different channels would allow me to build Next Season slowly, give me the time I needed to not rush (and to pay my bills in the meantime). And it would force me to learn how to do my own business development, how to generate diverse streams of paid work - keys to de-risking my career in general.

These are the various freelance projects / income streams I have had going on in parallel to Next Season and specifically how I found them, for reference:

• Seminars and Special Projects for Future Fabrics Expo, the largest showcase dedicated exclusively to sourcing innovative, sustainably and

  responsibly-produced, best-practice and certified materials for fashion, footwear, home, interiors & lifestyle.

  • I first came across FFE on LinkedIn in October 2023, when they started publicizing an upcoming New York edition of their annual London show. I cold messaged Nina (the founder of FFE) directly and offered to volunteer. After volunteering those two days of the show, I joined the team part time and have been supporting for almost three years now.

• Digital product strategy / consulting work for Alternew, the care and repair operating system for modern brands.

  • I first met Alternew founder through ‘s Untangling Circularity podcast coalition in 2024, and was then reintroduced by a former colleague (we bumped into each other at a Fashion Tech networking event!!). After joining first as an advisor, I later took on a larger role / engagement in 2025.

• I’m in active discussions for a new freelance project related to local apparel / fashion manufacturing as we speak.. I hope I don’t jinx it by mentioning here 🤞 this one was recommended by a friend in the space who saw a posting on LinkedIn.

• I did some unpaid advisory and / or volunteer work for a couple of different small organizations back in 2024, found through a mixture of personal introductions and / or cold outreach on LinkedIn.

• Through the Next Season startup I’ve also experimented with paid knitting & upcycling workshops, and have plans add additional revenue streams (beyond knitted apparel / products) in time as well.

• And, in full transparency I also had / have the benefit & privilege of severance pay, not insignificant personal savings to pull from, and family support along the way.

I’m always on the lookout for new openings. Writing this piece I’m reminded that I should probably spend a bit more time on LinkedIn… 🙃 And I know that volunteering is a controversial topic, because I believe people should be paid for their work. I have however found it to be a useful way to get a foot in the door for bigger projects. My suggestion is to make sure any volunteering you’re doing is well defined and time-bound.

I’ve jotted down here a couple of factors I like to consider when determining if something is a good ‘fit’ -

• Will this opportunity help you build new skills, especially skills that you think will be increasingly important in the future?

  • for me, I’m prioritizing people skills / ‘soft’ skills, high quality writing & storytelling - all the more important and valuable with the rise of AI

• Will this opportunity help you meaningfully expand your network?

• Does this opportunity leverage your existing skills? Does it maybe scratch a different mental itch from your own startup / main project / other projects?

• And, remind yourself that each new contract is an opportunity to revisit your rate!!

To be clear, I don’t have this ‘portfolio’ fully figured out yet. And I still have quite a ways to go before Next Season is financially viable on its own. But I did recently put a (financial) stake in the ground, sharing my goal of hitting $1M annual revenue two years from now (eek), which will the decisions I make going forwards - for Next Season and for my portfolio career in general.

In sharing a closer look at my own ~founder’s journey~ over the past few weeks,

• figuring out the broader space I wanted to work in

• the specific problems I was drawn towards solving

• how I decided to start something of my own, and

• how I’m going about bootstrapping it…

I hope that I’ve helped you think differently about your own career / startup journey. Or at the very least, I’ve helped you feel less alone. If this series resonated with you, I’d love to hear from you!!

Because I’d wandered down that path before. In 2019, I started experimenting with travel startup ideas. I had a vision for ~personalized travel recommendations~ that sounded good on paper. And because I was a product manager at a ~personalized shopping recommendations~ app, theoretically I had the right expertise.

I quit my job that November with a stronger feeling of moving away from something than moving towards something, and set to work on my idea.

Like any good PM, I started with user research, interviewing friends and friends of friends about their travel planning habits. And I started writing a travel recommendations newsletter.

But there was a chasm between the work I was doing and the work actually required to realize my vision. Because my vision was an app - and I couldn’t build an app myself, and I didn’t really want to learn how to code… I would need to hire someone (or convince someone to join as a technical co-founder) to build the product. And that would inevitably require funding.

And funding for what? I would need evidence that a market existed for my product… and that I had access to said market. I didn’t really have either of those things.

I soon felt disconnected from the project, like I was going through motions or play-acting the activities of a founder. When Covid shut down the travel industry I was relieved to have a good excuse to stop and find a new job.

The whole experience had been haphazard and demotivating. And lonely!

So years later, when faced with the opportunity to pick my own path, I didn’t consider entrepreneurship.

Obviously in the subsequent ~7 months, my feelings changed. So how did I get here?

Where we left off in my founder’s journey

I’d been networking and job searching for ~3.5 months, and I’d learned that:

• I did not want to work full-time at another software company

• I was more interested in (sustainable / circular) clothing production than next-gen materials

• and I wanted to work on building new systems vs work on changing existing systems

I’d found a problem I wanted focus on, a question to explore: is it possible to create clothing with a systematically different method of development & production? To make clothes people want & are willing to pay for, in a more sustainable way?

This narrowed my job search considerably. Who out there was working on this problem? I did find one company, Unspun.

Unspun is building innovative 3D weaving technology with an aim to speed up certain types of apparel production and reduce material waste in the process. It fit my Fashion x Tech x Climate x Manufacturing niche perfectly. Too bad the company is in SF and I wasn’t open to moving :)

So my search continued…

And in that time, I realized that I already had some experience making sustainable clothing…!

I’d adopted knitting as a hobby during the pandemic, my muse a knitwear designer that works with scrap yarn. I’d bought her book, and knit my own versions of her sweaters. Was that not circularity? A form of remanufacturing, albeit an unscalable one?

Now I wanted to unravel an old sweater and re-knit it into something new, and I started this newsletter to document the process. It was an exploration of the problem using skills I already had: knitting with scraps! Writing newsletters!

It wasn’t a ~startup~ yet, but it was a ‘product’, that sweater, this newsletter. An MVP. Something I could put out into the world and get feedback on. Would people find it interesting? Useful? Valuable? I would only learn by doing.

The project became vehicle for education and adopting new skills:

• Apparel manufacturing

• Machine knitting

• Better writing & storytelling

I started my upcycled sweater, this newsletter, and a machine knitting class in January 2024.

Back in 2019, I participated in an accelerator program called Tacklebox. The founder Brian positioned it as an accelerator for founders that are deciding whether to quit their day job. One concept that stuck with me was his theory of ‘whisper ideas’.

Whisper ideas, he said, are ideas that you lower your voice to explain. You whisper because the you’re worried that someone will overhear and beat you to it.

Brian’s advice was to forget about whisper ideas. You should be able to shout your idea and not care, because nobody else would be crazy enough to try it. Best if your idea is something that only you can do.

When I started this newsletter, I didn’t have a long term outcome in mind, I just started where I could.

But in the process of writing (exploring), I started to envision a solution to my question, and a path to get there. Only then did I start to call this a ~startup~ in my mind. That’s how Next Season (my upcycled knitwear brand and remanufacturing studio) was born. More on my specific vision and why I’m building it the way I am in a future post :)

The path forward was paved with skills & expertise I already had, and skills I was motivated to learn.

I (still) didn’t want to learn how to code. But I did want to learn how to to make circular clothes, to tell meaningful stories. Somehow I’d managed to combine all of my interests and experience into one crazy pursuit. From my previous post:

I’d been dabbling in making my own clothes (sewing, pattern making, knitting) for years. I’d studied Mechanical Engineering in school. I preferred working on early stage startups to working in industry, and I was an outsider to the current fashion system anyways.

Looking back, I’d call this process finding founder-product fit.

I didn’t have a job to quit, but I decided to take a leap and announced I was starting.

I figured I could ‘go back’ or find a job* if I needed to… but I was motivated to keep going.

*Around this same time I became aware of the concept of ‘portfolio’ careers, which has also shaped how I approach Next Season. I wanted to give myself time and financial breathing room to start small - more on this in part 3 of this founder’s journey series, next week.

Thoughts on how to find founder-product fit

People often say they want to start a company but don’t have the ~right idea~ for it. It’s helpful to start by reframing this as a problem you want to solve, or a question you want to explore. Ask yourself:

• What is something that I am capable of doing TODAY however small?

  • Lean into IRL connection where you can, bc at the end of the day for whatever you’re doing to be successful you’re going to need to get other people on board & engaged! And we’re all craving connection!!

  • This could look like a newsletter, a meetup / gathering / event series, making a physical (or digital) prototype or mockup to test, etc.

• What unique perspective and skills can I bring to this problem?

  • Be creative! We each have a singular combination of expertise / strengths / abilities…

• What are small increments of work / product I can frequently put out into the world for feedback?

  • Consistency and training is often underrated and underreported in startup success stories

  • The vision should be big, to keep pulling you forwards, but the process should be rewarding (if not always perfectly enjoyable) because you won’t survive if your payoff only comes at the end - aim for singles, not home runs

• In addition to the above - what are the most important types of work needed to solve the problem? If I don’t have those skills now, can I build them?

  • To continue the sports metaphor, you should be MUCH more concerned with your daily training than with the big game at the end of the season. Start with a hypothesis about the right activities (for you) for the outcome you want, and test it along the way.

  • For me, for example - I decided early on that writing would be one of the most important things for me to do and get better at. I write almost every day now.

• How can I work with others? Do I know / am I meeting the right people to work with? If not, how can I find them?

  • If you’re pursuing your own thing, you might go for a long time without coworkers / teammates. You will absolutely need community, other people who also care about this problem, to work together and to support each other!

• How does this fit into my life in general?

  • There are pros and cons to going ‘all in’ vs part time / portfolio, and no one right answer. It’s all dependent on how this work fits into your life. More on that next week!

Next week we’ll pick the series back up, sharing my (kinda delusional) mental leap from ‘I’m not interested in starting my own company’ to ‘I’m launching an upcycled knitwear brand’… If you missed parts 1 or 2A you can find them here:

And one more announcement before I jump into August events… a new realllllly big project I’ve just started working on:

I’ve decided to create a knitwear collection out of NYC waste…!

In my mind, this project has 3 distinct facets:

1. Learning about & plugging into the greater NYC textile recycling ecosystem, inc. collecting, cleaning & sorting, and ultimately unraveling old sweaters for reuse.

2. Designing and producing a new collection. A few styles, classic silhouettes. Easy, eclectic, and warm. Inspired by New York City - but not in a cheesy way.

3. Creating a docuseries of sorts, following the process from start to finish. You can follow the series on Instagram: @nextseason.nyc. I promise to share updates and deeper dives via this newsletter too!

It’s… a lot, especially since I’m aiming to launch the collection in time for the holiday season. There are still a lot of unknowns! But this project has been taking shape in my head for months now, and it feels so good to finally start in earnest.

More soon!

Repair Remix & Rewear: August

💚 = events Next Season is hosting / supporting
🍬 = budget-friendly events ($15 and under)

This month in NYC (& virtual)

• 8/1 - 🍬 NATURAL DYE PLANT WORKSHOP @ Gil Hodges Community Garden - 11am (Gowanus, Brooklyn)

• 8/2 - 🍬 BPC REPAIR FEST - 10am (FiDi, Manhattan)

• 8/2 - 🍬 RU Workshop: Politics and Poetics of Repair - 2pm (Governors Island)

• 8/5 - Hand Mending - Darning w/ @ Home Ec NYC - 6:30pm (Long Island City, Queens)

• 8/6 - Visible Darning & Mending with a Loom - 6:30pm (FiDi, Manhattan)

• 8/6 - Natural Bundle Dye Workshop @ Brooklyn Craft Company - 6:30pm (Greenpoint, Brooklyn)

• 8/10 - Denim Mending @ Brooklyn Craft Company - 6:30pm (Greenpoint, Brooklyn)

• 8/12 - Mending Club @ Lagoon - 6pm (Bed-Stuy, Brooklyn)

• 8/16 - On The Mend 101: Learn how to hand-sew your tears & holes w/ - 10am (Long Island City, Queens)

• 8/20 - 🍬 Summer Style Sip & Swap Networking Mixer - 6:30pm (Midtown, Manhattan)

• 8/23 - On The Mend 101: Learn how to hand-sew your tears & holes - 10am (Downtown Brooklyn)

• 8/23 - Visible Darning & Mending with a Loom - 3pm (Greenpoint, Brooklyn)

• 8/26 - Patternmaking for Upcycling Workshop - 10am (Midtown, Manhattan)

• 8/26 & 9/2 - Alterations - Jeans (2 week workshop) @ Home Ec NYC - 6:30pm (Long Island City, Queens)

• 8/26 - Adorning with Buttons @ - 7pm (Clinton Hill, Brooklyn)

• 8/27 - 🍬 TOAST Brooklyn Exchange - 6pm (Boerum Hill, Brooklyn)

• 8/27 - Natural Dye Workshop: Bundle Dye with Flowers - 7pm (Clinton Hill, Brooklyn)

• 8/29 - 🍬 SwapClubNyc Monthly Clothing Swap - 12 noon (Bushwick, Brooklyn)

• Multiple dates - Silkscreen Collage & Silkscreen Studio @ Atelier Jolie (Manhattan)

• Multiple dates - 🍬 Mending Circle @ Knitty City (Manhattan)

• Multiple dates - 🍬 Monday Maker Night @ Brooklyn General Store (Brooklyn)

• Multiple dates - Visible Mending Workshop: Denim Upcycling with The Hoop (Manhattan)

If you’re hosting / aware of an NYC-based or virtual event dedicated to repairing / mending, upcycling, or rewearing your clothes, please reach out - I’d love to include it in this weekly roundup!

Rough outlines of a new direction were taking shape in my mind (last week I wrote about how a first date revelation inspired me to consider pivoting from tech to fashion & climate).

But it was all hypothetical until I got laid off that August. Only then I had a pressing need to answer: what am I going to do now?

I’ve had versions of this conversation with so many friends over the years since - how I found myself leaving the tech world behind and jumping into circular fashion; starting an upcycled knitwear brand, freelancing on the side, and overall doing work I love.

And now I’m finally getting around to documenting this part of my journey. Retracing my steps and sharing it with you in the hopes that it helps you explore your own career pivot.

I’d originally intended to write as a 3-part series (part 1 is linked above), but as I got further into writing this post I realized I had to break it in half, hence 2A today focused on the months immediately after my layoff & how I narrowed in on the problem I wanted to solve. Part 2B next week will cover my (maybe delusional) mental leap from ‘I’m not interested in starting my own company’ to ‘I’m launching an upcycled knitwear brand’…

My initial hypothesis

Even before I got laid off in August 2023, I had an idea about what I wanted to do next. I wanted to work at the intersection of Tech x Fashion x Climate, and I wanted to work with materials and / or ‘hard tech’, not just software. It was a solid starting point for my search. And I was lucky to have severance pay and savings, aka some luxury of time to explore.

I was particularly curious about a growing category of ‘next-gen materials’ startups - companies developing lab-grown, bio-fabricated leather; companies developing processes for textile-to-textile recycling. After years of passively keeping an eye on the space, I was familiar with a few: Modern Meadow, Tomtex, Circ.

These startups looked a perfect match for my criteria. They were focused on delivering sustainable material alternatives to the fashion industry. And they didn’t seem as alien to me as the traditional textile industry; many were VC-backed and part of familiar tech accelerators.

Still, my revelation r.e. wanting to work in climate / climate tech was recent, and I knew enough to know that I didn’t know the space very well.

After returning from a weaving workshop in Oaxaca (I’d booked it months before I was laid off, before any serious consideration of a career pivot to textiles… how prescient), I spent that fall attending every possible meetup, gathering, and panel I could find related to climate tech or sustainable fashion. I went to Climate Week NYC for the first time, and made new friends.

I sent cold DMs on LinkedIn asking to ~pick brains~ and ~learn more~. I applied for a wide range of jobs, I volunteered to pick up trash at Rockaway Beach and to be an extra set of hands at Future Fabrics Expo: NYC Edition, a sustainable materials trade show (I went on to work for FFE part-time and still do today). I joined Slack groups and Discord servers, and I spent a good chunk of time every day knitting for fun.

I was getting a lay of the land, learning the who’s who of sustainable fashion and materials. How did they speak about their product, about sustainability, about their tech? What sort of skills were they looking for? What resonated with me?

What I thought I would do completely shifted.

I was inadvertently conducting my own Double Diamond design process. First I went broad, absorbing as much as I could at this Tech x Fashion x Climate intersection. In time, a couple of key observations and insights helped me narrow my focus.

What I discovered

I did not want to work full-time at another software company
(even one that was right at the intersection of tech x fashion x climate)

Ok I was already pretty sure that I didn’t want work full time at another software company. But, my feelings were distinctly reaffirmed when I interviewed for a Product Manager job at a company of a similar size and stage to the one I’d left. It was a re-commerce tech company, aka software for brands running resale programs, aka right at my desired intersection. But my gut was screaming NO and I was relieved when they paused hiring for the role.

I was not a skills-match for next-gen materials startups

At early-stage startups, I think you can pretty much boil the work down to two things: making the product and selling the product (…and maybe fundraising). As I talked to next-gen materials startups, I realized I didn’t have the right skills and / or connections to do either.

Number one, I’m not a chemist or a chemical process engineer. Number two, I was not well connected to the target customer of these materials, the sourcing teams at fashion brands. Maybe I could wedge myself in as a project manager, but a lot of these companies were too early / too small / too lean to hire more generalist roles. So I kept searching, looking not just at next-gen materials but also at Climate Tech more broadly.

My advice to you

• Go to as many events / networking etc. as you can - but give yourself permission to leave right away once you get there. When you’re in a discovery phase, better to go and not talk to anyone than to not go at all!

• Volunteering / ‘activity’ based events are particularly good if you’re feeling a bit socially shy. Volunteering is also way better for forming meaningful connections than chatting about job openings over drinks.

• I can’t stress enough the importance of meeting & talking to new people and especially of making new friends!! I made a lot of new friends during this period, and we’ve supported each other on our respective career journeys ever since.

Where I narrowed

I was more interested in (sustainable / circular) clothing production than next-gen materials…

And I wanted to work on building new systems vs work on changing existing systems

En route home from Newlab after attending a panel discussion about food packaging and circularity, my brain was churning with ideas. It was late October; I’d been immersed in exploration for just over two months.

I’d been focused on sustainable materials startups. But I realized they were struggling to sell, lacking product-market fit (this was something I was very familiar with). Mentally I moved upstream, and started to zero-in on the higher-order product: the clothes themselves, and how they were manufactured. I started brain dumping my thoughts into a Notion page as I walked.

And I considered two different angles of approach: incremental changes within a system, at scale versus attempting to build a new system, small to start. Both are necessary, both have their merits. Personally I was pulled to the latter.

What really got me excited was the resonance of these insights. I’d been dabbling in making my own clothes (sewing, pattern making, knitting) for years. I’d studied Mechanical Engineering in school. I preferred working on early stage startups to working in industry, and I was an outsider to the current fashion system anyways.

All of these themes seemed to click into place (at least in my mind) - of course it made sense that I’d want to explore crazy new ways to manufacture clothes!

My advice to you

• Panels can get a bit dry and repetitive. I found myself focusing less on the content and more on the speakers. Ask yourself: who speaks in a way that ‘makes sense’ to you? How do they view the ecosystem and where they fit into it - does it resonate with you? Those are the people you should prioritize connecting with afterwards.

• Explore your initial ideas but don’t be afraid to consider companies / paths outside of what’s familiar. And then take a realistic look at your skills and how / where they fit in, this should help you narrow. Would you need to go back to school to make the change? Not a dealbreaker, but a big decision / investment to make.

• Do you have past experiences / lives / skills that you’re not tapping into now that you want to? What topics have you continually revisited throughout your life? Everything you’ve learned can be additive.

I was coming up on 3 months unemployed when I honed in on this problem I wanted to work on. Over the next ~3 months I semi-consciously put the wheels in motion to start my own company. More on that next week…

I was employee #18 at a very well-funded Series A startup, hired specifically for my relevant & niche experience building conversational commerce (aka text-based) mobile shopping experiences.

It was a logical step in my career: a salary bump, a title upgrade, and I reported directly to the Founder / CEO. And if I squinted hard enough, it combined my product management expertise with my love of fashion (or at the very least, my love of shopping).

But I hated it.

The revelation

What would you do if you could do anything? I was on a first date when I heard myself answer that I wanted to work at the intersection of tech and fashion… and climate?

I’d never (consciously) entertained the idea of working on climate change-related problems before. But I guess a little bit of alcohol + a desire to present my most idealized self helped me realize what was missing from my career.

Full transparency - I’ve never been what I’d call an eco-minded person. I’m not particularly outdoorsy, and was not early to the climate movement.

But I was disillusioned with the tech industry.

I was never one to drink the Silicon Valley “we’re saving the world!!!” Kool-Aid (err, Juicero?), but the Product Management career path promised opportunities for creative problem solving.

Now, the ‘problems’ I’d signed up to ‘solve’ felt increasingly shallow; the work like felt like myopic pixel pushing.

For the first time I was asking, why? Why are we trying to make shopping frictionless? Why am I spending my brainpower greasing the skids for overconsumption? It felt gross.

And I couldn’t stop thinking about fashion. I knew too much about the social and environmental harm. Were there ways to make fashion more sustainable and less wasteful? To shift the model from quantity to quality?

The pivot

~5 months after the aforementioned first date, I got laid off. The hypothetical ‘what would you do if you could do anything’ became ‘what am I going to do now’?

Product Manager-world is filled with frameworks for understanding your customers and influencing product adoption - aka figuring out how to get people to change.

One such framework that’s stuck with me is the Progress Making Forces Diagram, part of the Jobs-To-Be-Done framework coined by Bob Moesta and Chris Spiek.

My ‘push’ and ‘pull’ were clear - I was jaded with Big Tech and the growth of convenience culture, and I was drawn to explore a small part (fashion & materials) of a big, real problem (climate change).

When I was laid off, the ‘habit’ force was removed. All that was left was anxiety.

But I had some severance pay and savings, and stepped into the unknown. I needed to figure out where I fit into the Tech x Fashion x Climate world I was so eager to explore.

How would you answer the first date question - what would you do if you could do anything?

• What are you moving away from?

• What are you pulled towards?

• What big dreams or ideas scare you?

• What habits / comforts are holding you back?

Next week I’ll share more about the specific activities I did during this amorphous time between leaving tech and starting Next Season, and the learnings informed my startup’s mission, vision, and MVP.

Every summer I’m stumped on summer tops, and every summer I drawn to inspiration for designing and knitting my own shells, camis, even t-shirts.

And back in 2024, just a few months into learning machine knitting, I stumbled across this retro pattern and was instantly obsessed:

Cut to this past April, a few weeks after the Sporty Top launch. I was chatting with Claire continuing our Fireside Pilates x Next Season Sporty Knitwear collab, and she threw out the idea of designing a halter top.

The above image flashed in my mind. I said yes immediately and set to work drafting a pattern, choosing to preserving the ribbed side panels from our original Sporty Top design. And of course we stuck to our values of circularity and minimizing waste, again working with deadstock Merino wool yarn and producing pieces only on demand.

Why Fit Was Our #1 Challenge in Designing The Sporty Halter

We ran into and worked through a few key issues before landing on a final design:

• Bunching around the bust

• Strap design & attachment

• Sizing

Bunching

On my first attempt to knit this top, I used stitch decreases to create the front triangle. For non- machine knitters, decreases are made by using special transfer tools to move two stitches from side by side needles on to the same needle, so that the next row knits the stitches together. This decreases the total count by 1. Making decreases on each side of a rectangle → trapezoid or triangle.

The problem with decreases is that the resulting edge doesn’t have a lot of give or stretch. We wanted this part of the top to mold around the bust; instead the decrease edge was taut, cutting across the chest.

Emma, Claire and I then spent almost two hours on Memorial Day brainstorming about fit. We went back and forth about the thickness of the straps, and how to create a design that read more ‘substantial’. We’d found another knit halter design to pull inspiration from. I was worried about completely re-making the design / pattern from scratch, but agreed we needed to find a way to improve the fit around the bust.

I made another attempt at the top using short row shaping instead decreases. Short row shaping is a method of knitting only parts of a row at a time, by putting some needles / stitches in a row ‘on hold’ while knitting the others. With short rows, you can create curves and shapes while preserving a stretchy edge. This was a huge improvement over the first prototype.

Straps

I went back and forth on the strap design, experimenting with 1x1 rib versus full needle rib, and exploring a bunch of different ways to join the str to the top.

This part of the process involved the most trial and error, at least 5 or 6 different attempts to join the straps to the body. It was crucial that the join:

1. was durable / secure

2. looked good

3. could be executed easily / with minimal steps

I’d originally hoped to use my linker machine to attach trim to body, but it felt fiddly and couldn’t easily get it to work with our 4-ply yarn. Using only 2-ply didn’t feel secure enough and didn’t look good either.

**as a side note, if any machine knitters here have recs for Hague Linker tutorials, I’m all ears. I have yet to get totally comfortable using mine and would love to make more use of it / get it down pat!

Switching the body design from decreases to short rows ultimately unlocked the trim attachment design as well. With short rows, we could leave the triangle edges ‘live’ (aka not bound off), re-hang it onto the machine and knit the straps onto the body directly.

The blue and white halter also inspired us to experiment with a two-tone strap, incorporating both the body color and the trim color. And it came out great - I think it creates an optical illusion of thinner, more delicate straps without giving up the support of thick straps. And, it raises the line of the top so that it looks like it sits higher on the body instead of cutting across the chest.

Sizing

Every sample I made, I made smaller than the one before. I started with the original Sporty Top dimensions but realized quickly that I needed to treat this top as more of a tube top than a tank top, because the straps don’t provide a ton of support. So - the body / tube had to ‘stand alone’ and therefore needed to be much more fitted than our original design.

We even organized a small focus group with friends, to get outside feedback on key sizing questions!

The focus group informed our final changes: shortening the straps, raising the hem by half an inch, reducing the circumference by another two inches…

And now after countless iterations and tweaks, our new Sporty Halter is live and available in (very) limited quantities to shop online. As with the Sporty Top, it’s 100% deadstock Merino wool, handmade in our Brooklyn studio - and you can pick your own color combos.

We’re also offering virtual and IRL ‘sizing sessions’ that you can book to ask questions you might have about fit! Because we really want our designs to become closet staples - and we know that the clothes that fit us best are the ones we reach for again and again.

SHOP THE SPORTY HALTER

(and it’s 10% off until Thursday, w/ code EARLYBIRD10)

BOOK A SIZING SESSION

Introducing the Sporty Halter, dropping tomorrow:

As with the Sporty Top, the Sporty Halter is 100% deadstock Merino wool, handmade at our studio here in Brooklyn. And you can customize your colors! We’re super excited about this one - it took a lot of iteration to get the fit just right. Will share a deeper dive / behind the scenes look at the process soon.

Quantities are very very limited; sign up to our Sporty Knitwear mailing list directly to get alerted when it officially goes live tomorrow.. and for a special early bird discount code ;)

SPORTY KNITWEAR MAILING LIST

Andddd back to regularly scheduled programming, events for July. Including The World’s Biggest Mendathon... on a boat?! I just bought my ticket, c u there…

Repair Remix & Rewear: July

💚 = events Next Season is hosting / supporting
🍬 = budget-friendly events ($15 and under)

This month in NYC (& virtual)

• 7/1 - SWAP IT LIKE IT’S HOT ! SHOP & SIP PARTY - 2pm (Fort Greene, Brooklyn)

• 7/8 - Mending Club @ Lagoon - 6pm (Bed-Stuy, Brooklyn)

• 7/8 - BFF Dispensary NYC Clothing Swap - 6pm (Gramercy Park, Manhattan)

• 7/8 - Craft Club: Vintage Beaded Jewelry Making @ - 7pm (Clinton Hill, Brooklyn)

• 7/12 - 🍬 Repair Cafe at the Old Stone House - 11am (Park Slope, Brooklyn)

• 7/12 - Fashion Is for Everybody with Mel Corchado / Ita The Label - 1pm (Hudson Yards, Manhattan)

• 7/12 - The World’s Biggest Mendathon... ON A BOAT - 5pm (Pier 40 at Hudson River Park)

• 7/15 - SEW NEXT LEVEL :: Upcycling Workshop - 6pm (Bushwick, Brooklyn)

• 7/17 - Hemming Workshop @ - 6:30pm (Gowanus, Brooklyn)

• 7/19 - Sewing Upcycling: 6-hour intensive @ MakerSpace NYC - 12 noon (Sunset Park, Brooklyn)

• 7/19 - 🍬 Community Indigo Dye Bath - 11am (Gowanus, Brooklyn)

• 7/20 - 🍬 RIP Alternative Clothing Swap - 7pm (Bushwick, Brooklyn)

• 7/22 - Alterations - Hems @ - 6:30pm (LIC, Queens)

• 7/23 - Visible Darning & Mending with a Loom @ Brooklyn Craft Company - 6:30pm (Greenpoint, Brooklyn)

• 7/25 - 🍬 SwapClubNyc Monthly Clothing Swap - 12 noon (Bushwick, Brooklyn)

• 7/28 - Upcycling: Machine Applique Techniques @ Home Ec NYC - 6:30pm (LIC, Queens)

• Multiple dates - Refashion Lab - Sewing & Upcycle Workshop for Teens (Manhattan)

• Multiple dates - Silkscreen Collage & Silkscreen Studio @ Atelier Jolie (Manhattan)

• Multiple dates - 🍬 Mending Circle @ Knitty City (Manhattan)

• Multiple dates - 🍬 Monday Maker Night @ Brooklyn General Store (Brooklyn)

• Multiple dates - Visible Mending Workshop: Denim Upcycling with The Hoop (Manhattan)

If you’re hosting / aware of an NYC-based or virtual event dedicated to repairing / mending, upcycling, or rewearing your clothes, please reach out - I’d love to include it in this weekly roundup!

I first learned about FFE in October 2023, only two months after I was laid off from my tech startup job.

I was actively looking to pivot into the intersection of fashion <> materials <> climate when the Expo popped up on my LinkedIn feed, so I reached out cold offering to volunteer at their upcoming NYC showcase. I’ve been helping the team part-time with ticketing / registration and panel programming ever since, once more in New York, twice in London, and this year in Brussels.

Part trade show and part conference, FFE is a showcase for innovative and sustainable materials for fashion (and footwear and home). A rare space that’s wholly dedicated to advancing tangible solutions to the fashion industry’s endemic waste and harm.

This year we’re showcasing alongside Textiles Recycling Expo, which is focused more specifically on the issue of textile waste and recycling fabrics, footwear, and fibers.

My favorite part of each show is meeting new innovators, and seeing how these small and early-stage companies grow and evolve year over year. Because we’re all in the same boat, really - each of us choosing to pursue fantastical dreams of doing fashion differently.

Freelancing for Future Fabrics Expo has been an integral part of my ‘circular knitting journey’. Starting your own business can be lonely and volatile, and FFE has provided a stable and invigorating stream of work that (financially, strategically, mentally) supports my own startup, Next Season. I have a lot more thoughts about the benefits of taking a ‘portfolio career’ approach to bootstrapping startups, which I’ll go deeper on in a future post.

Bc for now, it’s midnight here in Brussels, and the show starts tomorrow… with a projected high temp of 96°F 🫠

I’ll be sure to share more about the cool innovations we’re platforming and my takeaways / learnings from the show once it wraps!

A lot has been built in these two years since:

• We have a studio space at Industry City, an intern (hi !), and two domestic knitting machines in regular use.

• We’ve designed and produced an original, fully upcycled, Next Season collection, shot a look book (working with friend and stylist ), and collaborated with at Fireside Pilates to co-design a line of deadstock merino Sporty Knitwear.

• I’ve gotten comfortable putting my face on Instagram, learned how to create engaging video content, and picked up followers along the way.

• And in this newsletter I’ve shared my progress, my wins and losses and lessons learned.

I'm at a stage where I have multiple projects running* and some (big) new things in the works, too. But I realized today that it’s been a while since I’ve put a larger, more ambitious goal out there… something that I’m a little afraid to admit.

For the past two years, I’ve had the extreme privilege of not having to think too too hard about financials. I’ve kept Next Season expenses very low, and I’ve had savings to live off of, family support / safety net, and various freelance projects for income. All of this has given me time and space to explore.

But of course there is a next step that needs to happen, for Next Season to grow from a startup to a viable small business. Coming into 2026, I knew this had to be the ~year of the business model~ and in recent weeks I’ve been particularly inspired reading about the various innovative, small, slow fashion businesses featured in Fashionopolis, and their trajectory to reaching ~ $1M-$5M in annual revenue.

A million dollars is a big leap from where we stand now… but consider this post my first stake in the ground, an outcome to work towards over the next two years. I’ll be sure to keep you posted along the way…!

*Things I’m looking forward to in the coming weeks:

• Heading to Future Fabrics Expo - this year in Brussels ! This is my third year supporting the team, and I’m looking forward to seeing many of my favorite fellow circular and sustainable fashion friends there next week 💚

• Gearing up to launch a new Sporty Knitwear style - and I have been working on this one for a little while now, and I started teasing it on IG (and IRL) after I realized I (truly) accidentally made one of our samples in Knicks colors:

• Producing a fun ‘styling series’ featuring the OG Next Season x Fireside Pilates Sporty Top - in collab with the lovely and ever-creative

And, more still to come later in the summer - I’ve got two ambitious new projects in the works that I’m really excited to start sharing about once I’m back from my travels… 👀

In 2020 I read two books that completely transformed my understanding of the fashion industry. Both were written by journalist : Fashionopolis: Why What We Wear Matters published in 2020, and Deluxe: How Luxury Lost Its Luster published in 2008.

I recently decided to re-read them both; I wanted to put myself back in that moment, to remember what it felt like for my understanding of the fashion industry, and especially luxury fashion, to shift. Because that’s ultimately my goal with Next Season too, to make the case for buying less and buying better. Not better as in ‘better known’ or ‘higher status’, but better as defined by hand craftsmanship, sustainable materials, and fair wages.

Fashionopolis illuminates the rampant waste and harm perpetrated by the fashion industry, and introduces us to inspiring ‘slow fashion’ pioneers like Natalie Chanin and Billy Reid, who have had success building small independent brands, ethically producing their products in the US using sustainable (and in some cases locally grown) textiles. When I read this book back in 2020, my lens was one of a consumer. I mentally made note of Alabama Chanin, Billy Reid, and zkano as brands to shop and support. This time around I noted down the details of their financial models, how much annual revenue they do. Their journeys can serve as a blueprint for my own business.

My (biased) favorite bit is the section highlighting The Sustainable Angle and Future Fabrics Expo founded by Nina Marenzi. I’ve been freelancing for the TSA team since 2024, and in two weeks I’m heading to Brussels for this years’ Future Fabrics Expo. FFE is a showcase and platform for sustainable textiles, educating and inspiring designers to source better materials. I had forgotten that TSA & FFE were featured in Fashionopolis (I wasn’t personally connected with the organization at the time), so it was a treat to see now-familiar names in print, recognized for their hard work and influence in the sustainable fashion world.

Deluxe takes aim at the industry of ‘luxury’ fashion. Even more than Fashionopolis, this book rewired my brain. Once I was out of college, I (for the most part) stopped shopping at typical fast fashion brands and focused more on high-end and luxury brands. To start, I shopped these labels secondhand via consignment stores.

But as my tech salary increased, so did my spending on ‘new in box’ luxury goods. I wasn’t thinking much about sustainability, and genuinely believed that luxury brands were better. Surely they were less wasteful, their supply chains were cleaner and more ethical…

Obviously not. We like to think of ‘luxury’ fashion and ‘fast’ fashion as opposite sides of a spectrum. But really, the spectrum is big fashion to small fashion.

Bernard Arnault, the chairman and chief executive officer of LVMH, is currently the 9th richest man in the world, worth approx. $162 Billion dollars. Amancio Ortega, majority owner of Inditex aka parent company of Zara, is number 15. Three members of the Walton family sit between these two on the list.

True luxury isn’t about selling billions of dollars worth of $750 logo t-shirts and $100 perfume. It’s about knowing who made your clothes, where the materials came from, and how to take care of them so they last you forever.

I only just started re-reading Deluxe, so you can look forward to a lot more related content coming your way :) And, I’ve got a couple of new, big projects for Next Season in the works too - more on those soon!

The only problem? I wore it to the last wedding I went to, back in November - and many of the same friends will be in attendance.

Past me would’ve gone down an online shopping rabbit hole, spending hours and hours hunting for a new (at least, new to me) dress. I do rewear a lot of my favorite day to day clothes: my favorite jeans, blazers, and button downs. But it’s hard to suppress the pull towards something new and shiny when it comes to special events.

I can feel TheRealReal app calling me to start a search, tugging at the back of my brain! I’ve decided to suppress my urges, though, and re-wear the Prada dress. It’s so good, and I don’t really need a new dress.

All that being said, naturally there are times when we DO really need to buy new clothes! Like the new summer tank tops I bought last week. The Skims tanks (eek!) I had on repeat the previous two summers were finally stretched out beyond wearability. And maybe for the next next wedding I attend, I will treat myself to a new (secondhand / vintage) dress…

The rest of this week’s post is practical, sharing my own personal hierarchy and recs for sustainably injecting ‘newness’ into my wardrobe, from repairs, to vintage, to mono-material basics.

Tier 1) Rewear, Repair and Swap

I have been feeling in a little bit of style rut these days, opting for my basics - jeans, tees, and tanks. And shorts, now that it’s finally good weather! Sneakers every day! I did treat myself to a pedicure on Sunday, arguing it ‘unlocked’ all of my sandals that gathered dust during winter…

Rewear

But my closet has a lot of fun and unique pieces that I love and never seem to wear enough. I need to do a little try on session and challenge myself to come up with new combos and fits. I know it’s cliche but I think we can always do better at ‘shopping our closets’ vs shopping for something new.

There are loads of great style writers here on Substack that I look to for inspo & new ideas too - here are a couple of recent ones that popped up in my inbox:

Yeehawt

7 Summer Looks Inspired by Vintage-Obsessed Frenchmen

The best French fashion magazine is full of American vintage and outfits good enough to transcend a language barrier. The more difficult translation is translating it off the page — a question of, “This look is cool on paper, but how can I take its ideas and incorporate them into my own way of dressing…

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3 months ago · 35 likes · 8 comments · MacKinley Jade

The Corner Booth

Sex on Top!

It is going to be a sex on top summer. Skimpy little things, fringe, sequins, lots of skin. Specifically (but not limited to) paired with headscarves or hats, very little makeup, and statement sunglasses. These tops aren’t “sexy” in the nightclub sense, though all forms are welcome. I’m thinking more like shoulders, collarbones, fabrics that move with y…

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4 months ago · 13 likes · 3 comments · Elizabeth Cardinal Tamkin

The Dressing Room

Stacks on stacks on stacks

Disclaimer: this is way too long for email. Please open in app or browser for the full experience…

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3 months ago · 68 likes · 21 comments · Kendall Flavin

Repair

Naturally with more wear comes the need for repair. Two of my favorite pairs of vintage Levi’s have been ‘out of commission’ for months… Why is it always the right butt cheek that seems to go first?!

I’ve dabbled in doing my own sashiko mends for jeans, but these two pairs are rarer redline Levi’s - so I sent them to my friend Taylor (@haytayembroidery) for professional help. I know that getting them back will feel just as good as buying new jeans. Better, probably.

Here my short list of care & repair resources.. These are our real sustainable fashion heroes! Pls drop a comment if you have a specific repair need - maybe I can help you find someome?

• Knitwear repair guides I put together for small holes, bigger holes / damage

• All-around repair experts that take mail-ins:

  • FXRY

  • Salvage Studio

• Care & repair guidance powered by Alternew
  (note: I’m an advisor for Alternew)

• You can re-dye / overdye your old and or stained clothes too!

  • Re-Dye Club

  • Green Matters Natural Dye Co

• Denim repair specialists

  • @haytayembroidery

  • Raw Meat & Repair Co. (great for leather & waxed cotton too)

I realized I’m sorely lacking in the cobbler dept. at the mo, so if you have a go-to please drop it in the comments. I (and my heels) would be forever grateful <3

Swaps

Swaps are great for scratching the itch of shopping for something new. A recent swap score included a classic white oxford cloth button down from American Apparel and these fun cotton pants in Next Season green (yes they look yellow here but they are almosttt chartreuse irl).

I try to include NYC-based swaps in my monthly roundups, usually found on IG and Eventbrite if you want to search for yourself. And don’t sleep on sharing & swapping with friends directly. It’s fun to keep clothes ‘in the family’ and see how your friends style them after you’re done!

Tier 2) Shop Secondhand & Upcycled (& Rental!)

Here are some tips and tools to make this easier, beyond the basic recommendation to shop at your local thrift and vintage stores. Rental is another option to consider, especially for those things you might only wear a few times or for a season. Think occasion wear, maternity, etc.

Secondhand

• Beni is a Chrome plugin and app that finds pre-owned alternatives to the e-commerce listings you’re eyeing. You can often find exact matches for popular brands and styles.

• There are some incredible vintage fashion curators here on Substack doing the lords work

  • with The Dressing Room

  • with Trash Panic

Expert advice on shopping TheRealReal here,

Shop Rat by Emilia Petrarca

What I've Learned from a Decade of Shopping The RealReal

This letter is brought to you by The RealReal…

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3 months ago · 111 likes · 11 comments · Emilia Petrarca and The RealReal

and I loved this piece that wrote about her search for the perfect wedding guest dress, very apropos.

Rabbit Fur Coat

rejecting the Reformation industrial complex

Let me preface this by saying… I didn’t think it would be this hard! Yes, I had requirements, but I knew there were dresses out there that could satisfy them. I just didn’t think they would be so expensive—and that I would be searching the dregs of the (not even secondhand!) internet for anything remotely resembling my style…

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a year ago · 295 likes · 117 comments · Eleanor

Upcycled

Obviously I’m biased on this one :) I’d like to do a proper roundup of cool upcycled brands, it’s exciting to see this space grow.

Rental

I’ll be honest I’m not an expert on rental - I know the household names, i.e. Rent the Runway and Nuuly. And Pickle for P2P rental. I’ve seen a bunch of smaller rental startups pop up here and there over the past few years, but haven’t tried any myself. Would def love recs here if you have them!

Tier 3) Shopping ~New New~

And of course sometimes we do really need / want to buy something truly brand new. I’ve been trying to limit my ‘new new’ purchases to socks, underwear, and tanks, and developed a personal mini rubric of three main factors I try to consider:

• Materials - is it made of mono-material that can more easily be recycled? Does the seller offer recycling?

• Longevity - is it something I can and will wear for many years to come, and / or would I be willing to repair it in the future ?

• Corporate Social Responsibility - who makes & sells it, and what are their motives? Ideally i’m looking for small, independent brands and businesses that are private and / or not striving for hyper growth.

Socks

Last year I needed new white crew socks - all of my Uniqlo pairs eventually busted at the heels. I did a lot of research to see if it was even possible or advisable to buy 100% cotton socks (socks almost always incorporate some synthetic stretch materials for comfort and to reduce bagging). But I know that blends are very difficult to recycle.

I didn’t find much in the way of pure cotton, so I asked myself - is there a sock that I would be willing to eventually repair?

Which kicked off a search for very high quality (if also expensive) socks. I got a three pack of classic white crew socks by RoToTo, made in Japan of 93% organic cotton. Yes they are 6x more expensive than Uniqlo, but I’ve worn these a TON over the past year and there is only minimal wearing in my usual spots. I think I’m on track to get 6x wears out of them anyways, so it all evens out in the end. And, I will hold myself to darning the heels if / when they do eventually blow out.

My next pair of socks will come from zkano, who makes socks here in the US with locally grown organic cotton. They also have a recycling program - you can mail in your ‘end of life’ socks and they’ll get turned into carpet padding for the auto industry.

Underwear, Tanks, and Tees

I desperately needed an underwear refresh, and was committed to finding 100% cotton. I’ve come across a handful of small / small-ish brands doing basic cotton underwear, and settled on Oddobody. It’s independent brand an operates as a Public Benefit Corporation, and they are super transparent about their materials (organic cotton), supply chain, and recommend composting @ end of life (just cut out the minimal elastic). I’ve been really happy with the lightweight feel and fit.

I bought some classic tanks and underwear from another ‘basics’ brand I’ve been following for a while, The Big Favorite. TBF was founded with circularity at the forefront, offering recycling for all of their products (underwear, tanks, tees). Recycling with TBF earns you credits and discounts for your next purchase. These are replacing some classic tanks I bought from Skims a few years ago and wore to death, so I know they’ll get a lot of airtime this summer. They’re much softer than the Skims tanks, just saying..

And a splurge - last year I bought the elevated Bibi Cami from Flore Flore. It’s organic cotton and has a luxe, weightiness to it that can be dressed up or dressed down.

None of these recs or links are affiliate - they’re just a roundup of a few things I’ve found and tried and like. It’s easy to get caught up in the guilt trap of researching for hours about what brands are the ~most~ sustainable and the ~best~ choice, but know there’s no perfect answer. If you learn something you don’t like, change it up next time. Start with mono-materials and durability in mind, and then keep your eyes and ears open for brands that are doing their business ‘slow’ (small, ethical, transparent).

One last rec to leave you with, I loved ‘s take on styling a 100% cotton Old Navy tee she styled multple different ways over the course of a week:

An Unquenchable Thirst for Color

You Don't Have to Spend a Lot of Money to Be Stylish

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3 months ago · 70 likes · 50 comments · Danielle

I did a little mending myself over the weekend, repairing big rips in these old Levi’s. Not 100% sold on how they’re turning out, but I’ll be sure to report back once they’re done!

Repair Remix & Rewear: June

💚 = events Next Season is hosting / supporting
🍬 = budget-friendly events ($15 and under)

This month in NYC (& virtual)

• 6/7 - 🍬 Darn it! Mending Club at the Textile Arts Center - 6pm (Gowanus, Brooklyn)

• 6/10 - Mending Club @ Lagoon - 6pm (Bed-Stuy, Brooklyn)

• 6/10 - Basic Hand Sewing & Mending Class @ Tiny Art Supply - 6pm (Ridgewood, Queens)

• 6/10 - Mending Skillz: Sashiko @ Recess Grove - 6:30pm (Williamsburg, Brooklyn)

• 6/11 - Zero Waste NYC Annual Summer Social + Mini Market - 5pm (Bushwick, Brooklyn)

• 6/13 - Alterations - Jeans @ - 5pm (LIC, Queens)

• 6/14 - Bundle Dyeing Workshop with Flowers and Kitchen Dyes - 10am (Staten Island)

• 6/14 - Sewing Upcycling: 6-hour intensive - 12 noon (Sunset Park, Brooklyn)

• 6/17 - Hand Mending - Darning @ - 6:30pm (LIC, Queens)

• 6/17 - Mending Skillz: Darning! @ - 7pm (Williamsburg, Brooklyn)

• 6/20 - Craft Club: Vintage Beaded Jewelry Making @ - 11am (Clinton Hill, Brooklyn)

• 6/20 - Visible Darning & Mending with a Loom @ Brooklyn Craft Company - 3pm (Greenpoint, Brooklyn)

• 6/20 - Alterations - Hems @ - 3:30pm (LIC, Queens)

• 6/24 - Mending & Private Shopping Night at Remix Market w/ @ - 6pm (LIC, Queens)

• 6/24 - Playful Mending - Darning @ Craft Society - 6:30pm (Gownaus, Brooklyn)

• 6/24 - Basic Mending Skillz @ - 7pm (Williamsburg, Brooklyn)

• Multiple dates - Silkscreen Collage & Silkscreen Studio @ Atelier Jolie (Manhattan)

• Multiple dates - 🍬 Mending Circle @ Knitty City (Manhattan)

• Multiple dates - 🍬 Monday Maker Night @ Brooklyn General Store (Brooklyn)

• Multiple dates - Visible Mending Workshop: Denim Upcycling with The Hoop (Manhattan)

If you’re hosting / aware of an NYC-based or virtual event dedicated to repairing / mending, upcycling, or rewearing your clothes, please reach out - I’d love to include it in this weekly roundup!

For those of you who aren’t in the sustainable fashion algo, the story broke yesterday: fast fashion behemoth SHEIN (aka enemy #1) is acquiring Everlane, spending $100M on millennials’ favorite ‘ethical’ fashion brand.

Everlane launched in 2011 and quickly went viral for their ‘radical transparency’ about the costs of making a classic t-shirt, comparing their pricing to luxury pricing. The original infographic is still visible on Everlane’s tumblr page (of course Everlane had a tumblr …lol).

Everlane’s website did (and still does) proudly display information about the materials and factories they work with, offering a lot more detail than most apparel companies. The brand has always been considered a vanguard of ethical and sustainable fashion.

Which is why the sale to SHEIN looks (at first glance) like a betrayal. How could a brand founded on the values of transparency, ethics, and sustainability sell out like this?

Because they weren’t only founded on the values of transparency, ethics, and sustainability.

They, like all VC-backed startups (Everlane raised it’s $1.1M seed round in 2011 with backing from institutional investors like Sand Hill Road OG Kleiner Perkins), were required to prioritize hyper growth.

Like all Private equity-owned companies (Everlane raised an $85M series F in 2020 led by LVMH-backed PE fund L Catterton), they are required to maximize returns.

Unfortunately, sustainable fashion brands with VC and or PE backing face a catch-22. In many cases brands like Everlane really are making efforts to reduce their impact, by sourcing better materials and setting more rigorous standards for their factories and suppliers. That’s more than can be said for a majority of apparel companies operating today.

But when a brand positions themselves as sustainable, ethical, and transparent as their ‘unique selling point’, we (understandably) hold them to a higher standard, and are all the more disappointed and critical when they fail to meet these aspirations. Sustainability, transparency, ethics are woven into the story sold to consumers, the angle used to differentiate these $15 t-shirts from other $15 t-shirts. But the goal is ultimately to sell more $15 t-shirts, at a better profit margin, in order to maximize returns to investors.

At the end of the day, the expectations of hyper growth and shareholder value trump all else. The sale from L Catterton to SHEIN is not a plot twist, unfortunately it represents the logical conclusion of Everlane’s journey.

A few years ago I read climate fiction novel The Ministry for the Future. The book was a bit over-long imo, but the themes were compelling: It’s 2025 (considered the ‘near future’ at the time of publication 😅) and a new international organization has been established under the Paris Agreement, with a mission to advocate for the world’s future generations of citizens as if their rights were as valid as the present generation’s.

The book explores a bunch of different think tank-y ideas for combatting climate change (like geoengineering and carbon quantitative easing) and ultimately asks the question: what might the world look like if we implemented policies and systems that prioritized favorable outcomes in the far future, versus favorable returns for shareholders within four to seven years (the typical investment horizon for PE funds)? Was the book fantastical and far-fetched at times? Yes. But we need more positive visions for the future to inspire us!

At an individual level it boils down to - how can we each contribute to leaving people and planet better than we found them? And in the context of shopping, can we shift our thinking to buying WAY less, and buying for life (or longer).

Next week I’ll come back to answer my original prompt, ‘what do I do when I actually need new clothes’, with a whole bunch of resources for what I consider truly sustainable fashion. Less emphasis on ‘what brands are good vs bad’ and more on practices for wearing and loving our clothes for longer.

My parents say I’ve always been particular about what I wear, that in preschool I was curating my own fits at Gymboree. I don’t remember a singular “awakening” to the world of fashion - it seems that I was always driven to express my personality through clothes.

Reflecting now, I can identify a philosophy of dressing, a formula I’ve followed (even if unconsciously), from as far back as I can remember. An alchemy of three elements:

• Something ‘popular’, signaling an awareness and understanding of fashion trends

• Something classic (and casual), because I’ve always hated feeling overdressed

• Something unique, that nobody around me would have seen before

Jeans from Hollister paired with a colorfully embroidered shirt from “V2V” (then known as “Vintage to Vogue”) a local, independent boutique. American Apparel tees with the limited edition Tokidoki x LeSportsac bag I scored off of eBay, that I still have and wear today.

This is not to say that I was always dressed well! A spin through Facebook photo albums reaffirms that I wore plenty of hoodies, sneakers, and t-shirts, staple pieces for a high school and college athlete.

But I did spend a lot of time thinking about and seeking out cool things to wear. I loved to trawl the TJ Maxx ‘Runway’ section (when it was still discounted designer one-offs) and the Second Time Around consignment shops (both locations!) on Newbury Street in Boston.

I spent a lot of time making things to wear, too!

I sewed my own little black dress when I was 12, worn to my family’s annual Christmas Eve party. A dress for my mom, with a fringed bottom hem. Accessories for my Barbies and Beanie Babies. Our house was full of my experiments in ceramics, painting, drawing, knitting, and quilting, but I always came back to clothes. I even submitted a set of fashion design drawings as part of my college application to MIT.

And then there was jewelry making, particular obsessions of mine. Every family vacation itinerary included a stop at a local bead store. When I was in middle school I enrolled in adult classes to saw and solder metal jewelry. I begged my parents to build out a studio in our basement, equipped with a jewelry bench and acetylene torch (obviously they said no).

I didn’t know it at the time, but I was creating a visual, social, and physical language by which to present myself, an identity. And it wasn’t just rooted in what I wore, but in what I made.

Consumption

I graduated from college in 2013, and moved to NYC that August. I had a well-paying corporate job in tech consulting, and I spent nearly all of my disposable income on clothes. My closet expanded accordingly.

I followed blogs reporting on clandestine sample sales; it was the heyday before the rise of 260 Sample Sale, when you could get into The Row without hiring a line sitter (I scored myself a leather cocktail dress for $180). I walked around the corner from my pre-Hudson Yards office on 33rd & 10th, for a chance to buy deeply discounted Hermès scarfs. I still throw them on from time to time.

Sure, I loved vintage and consignment too. But that didn’t mean I was shopping sustainably.

It’s easy to convince ourselves that shopping is a form of creative expression. That was my defense, as I became what sustainable fashion writer Tiffanie Darke calls a ‘high intensity shopper’. She defines the label as someone who buys, on average, two items of clothing or shoes per month.

It's Not Sustainable with Tiffanie Darke

High Intensity Shoppers are a Problem

Are you curbing your consumerism? I don’t know anyone who hasn’t given themselves pause over the last few years, but hey, that’s my circles. We all know we have too much stuff, we know it’s bad for us and, if you’re a regular reader of this newsletter, you know all too well the problems consumption is causing when it comes to resource extraction. The ga…

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4 months ago · 50 likes · 5 comments · Tiffanie Darke

My “creative energy” was directed towards constantly comparing oversized blazers, debating between The Frankie Shop and Tibi, and searching for the perfect Amina Muaddi heels for a bachelorette party outfit.

And I was part of the problem on both sides - consuming, and abetting. I’ve written before about my role in creating frictionless shopping experiences. My working hours were spent making shopping easier for everyone else too.

My spare minutes in between meetings became a blur of infinitely scrolling PLPs (product listing pages), with an eye towards optimization. But the excitement of a new purchase never lasted long; I was always searching for the next thing.

Conservation

In 2020 my screen time shifted from scrolling e-comm to scrolling the news, and I stopped buying as much. Stuck inside, I binge-watched classic Italian films and played dress up with the clothes I already owned.

I whiled away my days sewing, knitting, and reading. Two books written by journalist Dana Thomas, “Deluxe: How Luxury Lost Its Luster”, and her then new release “Fashionopolis: The Price of Fast Fashion and the Future of Clothes”, exposed me to the foundational flaws in the fashion system. The overconsumption, the waste, the social and environmental injustices.

My brain began to differentiate luxury ‘products’ from luxury ‘brands’. LVMH puts on extravagant runway shows to sell commodity logo tees, perfume, and Neverfull totes by the boatload, whereas true luxury is slow, handmade, not harmful to people or planet.

And then, while working at another frictionless shopping startup, I was laid off. For the first time in my life there wasn’t an obvious linear next step. What did I want to do?

During the pandemic I was reminded that I love clothes, not just Fashion, but the physical garments themselves. And not just wearing them, but making them and caring for them. I considered this as evidence that I would always love clothes.

It’s easy to see now that what I really craved was a sense of purpose, a challenge - and making clothes out of the materials we already have was an irresistible creative mission.

Since starting Next Season, I’ve been on what I like to call a ‘founders budget’ - and I hardly ever shop. In the past almost three years, I’ve purchased only five articles of clothing (not including socks, underwear, and a few basic cotton tanks), all secondhand. A complete 180 from my era of high intensity shopping.

That’s not to say it’s never ok to buy something new!! But we can all stand to get a little more comfortable wearing the clothes we already own again, and again, and again. Repairing them, re-dying them, and re-styling them - conserving them like precious resources.

And when we do buy something new, we can ask ourselves, is this something I can see myself caring for long term?

I was at a friend’s birthday party on Friday night, and someone asked me what my younger, teenage self would think if they say me today. Without hesitation, I said she’d be thrilled! Not because I’ve achieved some specific life goal or outcome, but because I’ve unblocked my creative spirit, found a matter to set my mind to. Next Season is my medium, a new way to express my identity and effect change through my clothes.

And you might be wondering, how did it go??

When we launched on March 19th, we genuinely didn’t know what would happen, whether people would ‘buy what we’re selling’ :)

I think it’s fair to say the first drop was a big success! But not without some bumps along the way - not surprising, considering this was my first ever production run aka knitting multiple units of a product in relatively short order.

Some of these were your typical / expected pain points (delayed shipments, quality issues) but we also ran into some unique, upcycling-specific challenges that I’m eager to dive deep on (to give you a sense of how we’ll need to think differently to scale circular models).

I (along with Claire and Emma) have been absolutely buzzing with excitement about the initial drop - and we’re looking forward to seeing where our Sporty Knitwear collab can go from here.

First, a top line summary of quant and qual results

• 10 tops sold (we sold out in the first 9 days!!), equaling $3,248.18 total sales.

• I’ll do a deeper dive on pricing in future, but high level - the Sporty Top is priced at a ~50% gross profit margin**. Per top, material cost is ~$33.

** This is quite low compared to industry benchmarks that sit at 60-70%, but our net profit margins may be more in line w/ or even higher than industry benchmarks of 10-20% considering our focus on lower cost customer acquisition strategies. Still, something that needs further consideration as Next Season grows.

• 292 subscribers to our Sporty Knitwear -specific mailing list, with a 71% avg open rate on sporty knitwear updates!!

• Best performing IG reel hit ~9.7K views // best performing Substack note hit ~13.5K impressions & generated 32 subscribers for this newsletter.

• Customer feedback snippets:

  • “It is *gorgeously* made, and feels wonderful on”

  • “The merino yarn is even softer than I could imagine and I can tell it’s created with the utmost quality and care”

  • “IT’S SO SOFT AND CUTE”

🫶🫶

Pain points & lessons learned along the way

We ran into a few classic snags, things like:

• Shipping delays on some of our materials and clothing tags, risking production delays.

• Improperly configured shipping options (oops) forced me to eat the $$ difference.. V annoying, but fixed now!

We also learned a lot about sizing: customers’ preferences for the regular vs cropped length, and how the top fits different body types. Now that we’ve seen the top on more people, we are better equipped to answer sizing questions & help you get the perfect fit!

But the biggest challenge we faced was directly related to our commitment to working with deadstock and offering made-to-order production.

When we launched on March 19th, we went live with two ‘body’ colors - teal and olive. Not knowing how many orders we’d get, we purposely did not stock up on materials in advance. There was always the possibility of overselling a specific color, and we noted on the PDP that, “because we work with deadstock, there may be slight variations in color from product to product".

By the time orders started rolling in, we realized we had a problem. We’d received six orders for Olive, but there was only enough yarn available for two. Our supplier (Colourmart) had another olive, but it was brighter and two-toned with red, and didn’t seem like a viable swap. We also identified a medium brown that looked nice - I ordered both to see if either, or a blend of the two, could approximate our original olive.

Claire, Emma and I agreed that customer satisfaction was of utmost priority. So, we reached out to the impacted customers, laid out the situation, and suggested the new olive and medium brown alternatives.

We also offered up a dark brown option, and sent additional pics the following week once I’d received and swatched it. We wanted to ensure customers were involved in the decision process, and totally happy with their choice. We also offered the option to ‘roll over’ their purchase to a future drop if they weren’t happy with any of these alternative colors.

In the end, two of the four went for medium brown, and two for dark brown.

And then I ran into knock-on challenge. Despite billing as the same yarn, “2/30NM lace weight extra fine merino cashwool” (2/30NM referring to the yarn thickness), the material properties of this color were justtt ever so slightly different enough from the yarns we’d been using so far that it wasn’t behaving the same way. The dark brown was knitting up looser and larger than our previous pieces!

This isn’t wholly uncommon in apparel production. Unfortunately for me, I didn’t have processes in place to catch the issue before spending hours knitting up the new tops. Luckly I did catch the issue before shipping out a top that was clearly way too big. After making some new gauge swatches at a tighter tension setting I validated that knitting this yarn at T5 (instead of T6) would result in a matching gauge (stitch tightness) and desired measurements.

In the end, these last few tops were finished and delivered slightly of the 3-4 week lead time promised (and cost me many additional hours of knitting 😅).

But most importantly, we took an issue that had the potential to be very frustrating for our customers and instead turned it into an opportunity to build trust instead of undermining it.

Fortunately our customers were ultimately very happy with their Sporty Tops. And, now we know to do some things differently next time…!

We made three key changes for drop 2 (announced on Friday, avail to shop here!!), in an effort to ensure our products and processes are designed to scale with small and variable material quantity:

1. We decided to offer three body colors instead of two, with an idea to spread out demand for any given color.

2. We chose body colors that are available in larger qty - reducing the risk of our supplier selling out before we do!

3. I inventoried our available yarn (including the various trim colors and left over bits, and yarn qty available from our supplier), and am tracking new orders closely to ensure we don’t oversell any given color. In the future I’ll set this up so colors get marked ‘out of stock’ automatically.

No question, these challenges added stress to the project. But they also helped me understand the baseline.

I knew that the first drop would ‘cost’ the most (both time and $$), and that each new run will be easier and more optimized as we learn. Now we have the benefit of lessons learned, and we can continue using materials & resources that were purchased in bulk to start (packaging, tags, etc).

And, for drop 2, Annie will have more availability for knitting, freeing my time for marketing / sales (and ops) and new product development… 👀

Now that we have a bit of ‘infrastructure’ set up, I believe we can easily launch new designs into this framework - so stay tuned!!

• New drop / new colors 👀 coming online this Friday 5/1 - sign up for notifications here !!

• We’ll be at Good Day Pilates in Brooklyn Heights on Saturday 5/2 from ~10am on with sample tops so you can see & try the new colors in person !!

Now that drop 1 is done, dusted, and shipped - I have a LOT to share about the lessons we learned. More on that next week!

Repair Remix & Rewear: May

💚 = events Next Season is hosting / supporting
🍬 = budget-friendly events ($15 and under)

This month in NYC (& virtual)

• 5/2 - Alterations - Jeans w/ @ - 11am (LIC, Queens)

• 5/3 - 🍬 Gay In The Garden: Queer Clothing Mending - 1pm (Upper West Side, Manhattan)

• 5/3 - Stitch Club: Adorning with Buttons X Katie Romero @ - 2pm (Clinton Hill, Brooklyn)

• 5/3 - 🍬 Darn it! Mending Club at the Textile Arts Center - 6pm (Gowanus, Brooklyn)

• 5/3 - Craft Club: Vintage Beaded Jewelry Making @ - 11am (Clinton Hill, Brooklyn)

• 5/5 - Upcycled Crochet Rag Rug @ Brooklyn Craft Company - 7:15 pm (Greenpoint, Brooklyn)

• 5/7 - Visible Darning & Mending with a Loom @ Brooklyn Craft Company - 6:30pm (Greenpoint, Brooklyn)

• 5/7 - 🍬 ♻️ Wasted Fashion: Designing a Future Without Waste | Panel + Showcase + Networking - 7pm (Greenwich Village, Manhattan)

• 5/9 - 🍬 Art in the Park: Upcycling Jewelry Workshop - 1pm (Shirley Chisholm Park, Brooklyn)

• 5/9 - GOD SAVE THE SHOES Shoe Makeover Workshop - 2pm (Bushwick, Brooklyn)

• 5/10 - Alterations - Hems @ - 3pm (LIC, Queens)

• 5/12 -🍬 Community Clothing Swap - 6pm (East Village, Manhattan)

• 5/13 - Mending Club @ Lagoon - 6pm (Bed-Stuy, Brooklyn)

• 5/13 - 🪡 hand-sew: upcycled bunny keychain workshop - 6:30pm (Brooklyn)

• 5/13 - Mending Skillz: Sashiko @ Recess Grove - 7pm (Williamsburg, Brooklyn)

• 5/16 - Denim Upcycling Workshop: Giving Old Jeans a Second Life - 2pm (Park Slope, Brooklyn)

• 5/16 - Queer Appliqué Workshop - 7pm (East Williamsburg, Brooklyn)

• 5/19 - 🍬 Jersey City Connects | Clothing Swap | Thrifting - 6pm (Jersey City, NJ)

• 5/20 - SEW NEXT LEVEL :: Upcycling Workshop - 6pm (Bushwick, Brooklyn)

• 5/20 - Mending Skillz: Darning! @ - 7pm (Williamsburg, Brooklyn)

• 5/27 - Patternmaking for Upcycling Workshop - 10am (Midtown, Manhattan)

• 5/27 - Basic Mending Skillz @ Recess Grove - 7pm (Williamsburg, Brooklyn)

• Multiple dates - Silkscreen Collage & Silkscreen Studio @ Atelier Jolie (Manhattan)

• Multiple dates - 🍬 Mending Circle @ Knitty City (Manhattan)

• Multiple dates - 🍬 Monday Maker Night @ Brooklyn General Store (Brooklyn)

• Multiple dates - Visible Mending Workshop: Denim Upcycling with The Hoop (Manhattan)

If you’re hosting / aware of an NYC-based or virtual event dedicated to repairing / mending, upcycling, or rewearing your clothes, please reach out - I’d love to include it in this weekly roundup!

Plastic and associated harmful chemicals like PFAS, Phthalates, and BPA (used to impart flexibility, rigidity, durability, etc. to plastics) are utterly inescapable in our day to day lives. It seems like every day a new report drops and further substantiates the health risks: plastic can cause reproductive harm, cardiovascular disease, cancer.

These days, about 60% of material made into clothing is made of plastic. Through normal wear and tear, textiles shed microfibers; synthetic materials shed plastic microfibers. 35% of the microplastics in the ocean come from textiles! And one of the biggest offenders? Sportswear.

Those Amazon Essentials and Fabletics sets are made with Lycra / Spandex, Polyester, and Nylon. And beyond shedding plastic microfibers, they’re often ‘finished’ with heavy metals, antimicrobials, chlorine bleach and formaldehyde too. Suuuuper yuck thinking about all of those toxic chemicals worn so tight and close to the skin. And there’s new research showing that microplastics can even negatively impact athletic performance?!

Maybe you’re thinking: “I only buy sportswear from high-quality brands.” But unfortunately that doesn’t protect you either! Last week, the Texas Attorney General announced an investigation into Lululemon over PFAS “forever chemicals”, which are associated with endocrine disruption, infertility, cancer, and other health issues.

OK we get it - plastic is bad. What can we do?

I’ll be honest. It’s gunna be impossible to stop buying plastic entirely. It’s just too pervasive.

Obviously toxic chemicals should be better regulated, to protect people and planet from their harmful effects. Existing regulations should be better enforced, too! As citizens and voters we can educate ourselves and shape public policy.

But there are some things we can do to reduce our risk and our impact as individuals too. And you should feel good about trying your best, knowing that your options and choices are imperfect.

I like to think about the problem through the lens of small, habitual changes. Committing to carrying a reusable water bottle every day means I haven’t bought bottled water in many, many months. When my sock and underwear drawer started to look grim, I bought 100% cotton replacements.

Next time you go to buy new clothes, sportswear or otherwise, check the label. In the US, clothing brands are required by law to print the material breakdown of a product on the tag. Note: manufacturers are not, however, required to disclose chemicals in clothes like formaldehyde releasers, used to keep fabrics wrinkle-free (which is crazy! a reminder to always wash new clothes before you wear them...).

But is there really a non-toxic sportswear alternative?

Yes! There is a growing trend of natural fiber sportswear as the risks of buying & wearing plastic are better known. And I’ve noticed an uptick in the popularity of vintage sportswear too - plenty of natural fibers and fun, retro vibes to be found!

To be clear, new clothes made with natural fibers can still come coated with chemicals, so it’s not a perfect solution (again, always wash first!).

And you can expect to pay more for natural materials than for plastic, because they are labor-intensive, requiring farming, cleaning, and processing. It’s easy to forget when you’re buying natural fiber clothes that they are essentially an agricultural product! Plastic is of course mass-produced cheaply from oil.

I was pretty horrified to learn that most synthetic clothing is only designed to be worn 7-10 times before it gets tossed. So yes it may be cheaper, but not necessarily cheaper per wear in the long run.

When we (Emma & Claire @ Fireside Pilates and I) first discussed collaborating on our line of circular Sporty Knitwear, we agreed on day one that we should work with (deadstock!) Merino wool, not just because it’s soft but also because it’s naturally wicking, odor-resistant and antimicrobial.

Ever notice that your synthetic workout gear starts to smell & ‘trap’ said smell right away? You can merino wool it like six times before it starts to smell and needs a wash. This Wirecutter writer went 10 consecutive days switching off between two Merino t-shirts - and by the end of his trip they hardly smelled. Honestly the idea that plastic = more convenient isn’t necessarily true…!

BTW - our first Sporty Top drop sold out in less than a week, but drop #2 is coming soon and with new colors too!!! You can sign up for email notifications about the drop here.

What to do with the synthetic sportswear you already own?

I’m not advocating you throw away the synthetic clothes you already own - it’s best to try and get more wear out of them. Fortunately, synthetics that have been worn and washed multiple times are likely less harmful. Some additional ways to minimize the impact (to yourself and to the environment) include:

• Wearing a natural under-layer closer to your skin.

• Washing your synthetics in a specialized washing bag designed to catch microfibers or even install a purpose-built filter on your washing machine.

This Wirecutter article about plastic workout clothes has a ton of great info and suggestions too. Can you tell I love Wirecutter? Lol.

So what’s the future of plastic? Some final thoughts…

Unfortunately most of it is destined for the landfill. And we know current recycling systems are broken.

In an ideal world, we would design, build, and implement truly circular systems for our materials, reusing them, breaking them down, and rebuilding them for their same purposes. And we would design out the harmful chemicals.

In our imperfect world, upcycling & downcycling are meaningful ‘compliments’ to progress towards true circularity. We don’t yet design our clothes to be remanufactured, or have good systems for collecting them, sorting them, and breaking them down to be remade into new clothes. Which is why I’m willing to use reclaimed synthetics for my main line of knitwear.

I view Next Season as a solution for ‘absorbing’ waste that we’ve already generated, an opportunity to increase its value. And just as important as the products themselves, Next Season is a platform for educating people about circularity, inspiring us to change what we buy and what we wear.

—

I recently watched a new Netflix Documentary, The Plastic Detox. The doc features my client / friends @ Future Fabrics Expo, an awe-inspiring showcase of sustainable and innovative materials for fashion & home, and I was excited to see them on the big screen.

The doc follows couples that have been struggling with fertility, and aids them in swapping out their day to day products (think cookware, clothes, toiletries, groceries, etc.) with plastic-free alternatives. I was shocked there were measurable impacts to the participants toxic chemical levels and fertility markers after just three months!! An uplifting reminder that small changes in our day-to-day choices can actually make a difference.