2 min read
For years, fashion has had a fairly predictable answer to excess inventory: sell it, discount it, move it to outlet, write it down and, eventually, make it disappear.
As of July 2026, that last option became considerably harder.
Under the EU’s Ecodesign for Sustainable Products Regulation, large companies can no longer destroy unsold apparel, accessories and footwear except under specific exemptions. Medium-sized businesses follow in 2030, alongside increasing disclosure requirements around what happens to unsold goods.
In slightly less regulatory language: Europe has started removing fashion’s delete button.
And that matters because banning destruction does not make excess inventory disappear. It simply forces a better question: what is the highest-value next use for this asset?
That question arrives at exactly the moment upcycling is becoming more commercially relevant. Kevin Germanier has created couture from excess inventory sourced across LVMH-owned brands. Coach is transforming used denim into new bags. Uniqlo is remaking unsellable and previously used garments. Across resale, repair, recommerce and regeneration, brands are beginning to treat existing products as inputs rather than endpoints.
The challenge is scale.
Traditional manufacturing thrives on consistency. Upcycling starts with the opposite: different garments, fabrics, trims, sizes, quantities and conditions. That variability makes it creatively interesting and operationally painful.
If every transformation starts with someone manually inspecting thousands of products, working out what can be recovered, designing around those constraints, sampling, calculating yield and then checking whether the economics work, it remains a project rather than infrastructure.
And somewhere in the middle of all of that is usually a spreadsheet having an absolutely heroic day.
This is where technology changes the equation.
At Bettter, what we are seeing is that brands generally know they have excess inventory. The harder problem is understanding what commercial opportunities are hidden inside it.
Which products can be grouped together? Which materials can be recovered? Which transformations are repeatable? What will they cost to produce? What margin can they create?
We increasingly think surplus inventory should be treated as a dataset before it is treated as material.
Understand it. Digitise it. Identify the patterns. Model the production economics. Then put creativity to work against those constraints.
AI is particularly well suited to this problem, not because designers need replacing, and certainly not because anyone needs a giant glowing “MAKE SUSTAINABLE FASHION” button, but because software can evaluate far more combinations of garments, materials, designs and manufacturing constraints than a human team can manually.
At the same time, consumer behaviour is helping. Upcycling no longer needs to be desirable because it is sustainable. Scarcity, provenance and transformation can make the product desirable in their own right.
Circularity becomes much easier to scale when the consumer does not need to consciously participate in circularity.
It simply becomes fashion.
My prediction is that within five years every major fashion group will operate some form of inventory regeneration layer alongside its traditional supply chain, connecting resale, repair, transformation and recycling through data.
The EU destruction ban is not the solution.
It is the forcing function.
The old question was:
How do we get rid of this?
The new question is:
What else could this become?
That is a far more valuable question.
Keep moving. Make it BETTTER.
V