FASHION MADE: Making Use of Deadstock Fabrics
In this interview, Stephanie Benedetto, CEO and co‑founder of Queen of Raw, explains how her company operates a digital marketplace that connects brands, retailers and manufacturers with unused textile stock (deadstock) to keep raw materials out of landfill and turn waste into profit. She describes the massive environmental impact of the fashion industry—second biggest polluter, over $120 billion worth of unused textiles annually, and a t‑shirt requiring 700 gallons of water to produce and another 700 gallons to wash—while highlighting how Queen of Raw’s platform can improve margins by up to 15 % and save a billion gallons of water. Benedetto discusses the historical inefficiencies of the industry, rooted in outdated paperwork, and how technology—blockchain for data integrity and provenance, and machine‑learning for demand‑supply matching—addresses these challenges. The conversation covers the company’s global expansion (US, Europe, Asia, Australia), geolocation of fabrics to reduce shipping and trade‑war complications, and the use of AI to track trends in fibers, colors and pricing. She also outlines the broader applicability of the model to automotive, aviation, electronics, architecture and interior design, and shares future ambitions such as a digital tactile fabric experience that could eliminate the need for physical samples. Benedetto’s vision is a world where waste is identified and eliminated at the source, solving the water crisis and allowing the marketplace to become obsolete, while still delivering financial benefits to businesses.
Chapters
I'm the CEO and co-founder of Queen of Raw. We are a marketplace for businesses, small to large, to buy and sell their unused textiles, keep those raw materials out of landfill and help them turn that pollution into profit.
Fantastic. Good idea.
Yeah, it's been exciting and an issue that I've been obsessed with for years. But until recently, nobody was paying attention to it. Now they realize what a massive impact it has on people. On planet, but also on their profit.
Yeah, yeah. I'm sure there's a lot of people then wanting to do that because, yeah, those two things are pretty important.
It's important, and today more than ever. I mean, we have Trump, China, Brexit, imports, exports, tariffs, trade wars, recycling laws. I mean, the list goes on.
Yeah.
They're going to be in trouble if they don't.
Yeah, absolutely. So you're seeing a lot of people taking this up?
Massive. I mean, the outreach to us direct from some of the biggest brands and retailers in the world, it's been really exciting to see, especially some of those that we had proposed this idea to a while ago, and it took them a little bit to get their head around. But now that we've done case studies and we can show that businesses that adopt this solution can improve their bottom line by up to 15% or more, improve their top line with sustainable stories to tell, and save— you know, we've saved in the past few months a billion gallons of water. It's like, it's a win-win-win.
Yeah, absolutely. It's interesting that the mindset shift happens, but until someone says, "No, you're going to make more money doing this," that's the real catalyst for change.
It is. And I'm okay with that because whatever we're doing, I think it should make sense for profit as well. It has to make it. Sustainability is a word, you know, I mean, it means so many things to so many people. But at the end of the day, a business that can sustain itself, right, is utilizing its resources in an efficient way and generating a great growing profit. This is one of the tools and business models that allows them to do that, and so it should.
Yeah, absolutely. And you work on sustainability, and it's interesting because the industry itself isn't necessarily, as a model, sustainable, because it's, you know, you make a lot of clothes and you hope that you sell them, but you don't always do that. And so you would say that it's not necessarily the most sustainable business model. You might not start doing it if that was your— if you're going to start the industry from scratch, you might not have done it that way.
Well, textile production may be It's the second biggest polluter in the world, but that means it has the power to solve the world's water crisis. So with that comes power and responsibility.
Absolutely.
Yes, you're right.
Absolutely. So is there a lot about making it more efficient?
Absolutely. I mean, you know, my family has been in textiles for over 100 years, since the 1890s in the Lower East Side, New York, the original garment district. So I grew up around this, loved the industry, disliked all the waste it produced, and just figured there had to be a better way. And I laugh because as I got into this more more with the big brands and retailers, I realized in many ways they're still doing things the way my great-grandfather did in 1896. We're tied to pen and paper or Excel spreadsheets. The problem with that is not that it's old school, but it creates massive inefficiencies, of course, to your point, as we have global supply chains, metric tons of water, chemical crops, oil, thousands of suppliers, tiers deep. Inevitably, there's going to be a lot of inefficiencies and we need to solve for that.
And I guess technology is playing a large part.
It is. It plays a massive part for us. I mean, we started as a marketplace, which of course in and of itself is a technology-based solution. It's an open digital marketplace. But inevitably, as part of that, we've built tools into our platform to nurture and support our community and help them with their efficiency and waste. So we do use blockchain, we use machine learning for very specific purposes, but to help them optimize and make their their solution more efficient.
Fantastic. Can you tell me a little bit more about your use of blockchain?
Yeah, so obviously, like sustainability, the S-word, blockchain is that B-word that means so many things to so many people. You know, for our purposes, we are not tied nor interested in the cryptocurrency, you know, of course. But the underlying technology for supply chain is revolutionary. So in our platform, we're talking about dead stock. This is stuff that it's critical if someone's going to be buying in a digital platform, whether they're small designer or large, that they know what it is, where it came from, what it's made of, who it goes to. I mean, that's critical to understand. They're not getting it necessarily directly from the source. So that's where we use blockchain technology to provide data integrity. So we know who said what, when. And that provides some protection around what this deadstock is. If there are sustainability certifications ascribed to that product, we can post it to the blockchain. Blockchain and that can remain kind of protected and with integrity. So it helps reduce errors, of course, in that decentralized database way that it does.
Absolutely. And more traceable as well.
Yeah, absolutely. I mean, our ultimate goal, of course, we focus on the waste and for a certain amount of steps, but you're seeing the conversations today like we are. Everybody wants to be by 2025, you know, 100% sustainable. And I'm proud of Zara and others for making that commitment. And even if they don't get there, Starting to know more up and down their chain about what happens is powerful. And I saw so many businesses that are thriving, you know, The RealReal, Poshmark, ThredUp, that are doing so many extraordinary things around finished goods, right, and the waste created there. But I didn't see anyone dealing with the systemic issue up the chain and the raw material side of things. And I believe the reason we have all this waste down the chain is because of these issues up the chain. And that's where blockchain and machine learning can help to correct.
Fantastic. Fantastic. You must work on such a global scale because of the very nature of the industry.
You have to. Surprisingly enough, when we started the platform, we did start it in the United States. And there is an incredible amount— more than you think— of deadstock that lives in the United States from all over the world. So it was a great place to start. But inevitably, to your point, this is a global problem. We need to be a global solution. So now we've grown by leaps and bounds in Europe, in Asia, now in Australia. I mean, it truly has has to be connected and global. And my ultimate goal is these brands and retailers can come to the marketplace and not only find high-quality textiles at a discount, but they find what they need when they need it, located where they're manufacturing. So you don't have to be shipping these and dealing with trade wars and imports and exports. You can geolocate on demand what you need.
Talk to me a little bit about the materials. It's quite an interesting thing because, um, You must have such a diverse range of materials. How do you then take those and do the best thing with them?
Yes, that's a great question. So a lot of what we are doing is data tracking in the secondary market. What fibers are trending? What colors are trending? Who's purchasing and where in the world they are? Because we do have a huge array and collection that is always changing every day. And some of our stuff is, you know, a dollar a yard, and some of our hottest sellers are $40, $50 a yard and above. So what what people are willing to pay, where they are, and what they're looking for. We have to be tracking that regularly. And so we do use machine learning and AI tools to understand our customer base, collect that data, and help make that match efficiently. Because, of course, to do our job in the marketplace, we need buyers and sellers to make that match quickly and efficiently.
Yeah, 100%. What do you think other industries can learn from the kind of stuff that fashion companies are doing at the moment?
Well, it's funny. I mean, at the end of the day, we did start this as a fashion tech company and around fabrics. But this applies across industries and around the world. So we're already selling textiles and working in automotive, in aviation, computer electronics, architecture, and interior design. I mean, these businesses use textiles. They're everywhere, right? We know they surround us. But then in the future, this kind of a model of looking at any of those industries and figuring out what is the biggest amount of waste that they have, where in the world is it located, How can we create a marketplace to sell it and tie it to this data that nobody was collecting? It can apply anywhere and for anything. So we didn't call ourselves Queen of Raw for nothing. It's raw materials in general, and we're excited to kind of grow and scale in that direction.
Your biggest people in using the Queen of Raw must be in the fashion industry at the moment. Is it just fashion industry, or do you find other industries are actually using it?
Other industries are actually are actually using it, some of the ones I just named. And then we do have now a separate category. The natural next category was interior design, of course. So anyone from makers, crafters, quilters, tinkers, interior design, art and architecture kind of was a natural segue. And then of course, we can continue to kind of grow it.
How long have you been doing it for?
So this is an issue my core team and I have been together for over 5 years looking at. But like I said, 5 years ago, were people looking at this issue? Well, we were, but not a lot of people were. So the timing wasn't right and we all had prior work that we were doing. So we officially launched last year and, you know, the timing couldn't have been better. Not good. We've been growing and scaling and we ended up being the grand prize winner of the WeWork Creator Awards by Ashton Kutcher. So that gave us a lot of kind of press and excitement and rally around the mission to go change the world. And we've been running ever since.
Congratulations on that.
Thank you very much. I mean, our ultimate goal, it's funny, but, you know, we built a marketplace. My dream is that for all these industries and everyone that has a supply chain, you never need this marketplace anymore. That I write myself out of the business because everybody has now identified waste in their supply chain using our software and tools and know how to intelligently minimize their waste streams going forward. And then I'll be happy because we'll have solved the world's water crisis, we'll have everyone on our software solution, and we can work on the next big problem to solve.
Well, I hope that happens soon enough.
Thank you.
Do you have any interesting facts regarding the sort of fashion apparel supply chain? Because I mean, I mean, you say, you know, so much about all these different intricate branches of what happens. I mean, there must be huge numbers and volumes of, as you say, water and things like this.
The biggest thing that nobody realizes, I mean, people have heard the statistics, textile production, it's the second biggest polluter in the world. I think a few things people don't realize is that if we continue at the current pace of textile production, by 2025, Not too far away, over two-thirds of the entire world's population will face shortages of fresh water from textile production alone. And, you know, we can break that down to average one cotton t-shirt takes 700 gallons of water to produce and another 700 gallons of water to wash in its lifetime. And that's one shirt. So the impact that deadstock can have and diverting this waste from landfill and not needing to manufacture so much new is massive. When I first got into this business, people thought, "Oh, you're in the scrapping business and you're collecting scraps off a cutting room floor." Well, yes, we actually do sell scraps by the pound because that has value too to our community. But we're also doing deals up to 1 million yards in deadstock. That's one person's scrap, but it's huge volume of what's sitting out there. We've actually run our numbers and every single year, over $120 billion worth of unused textiles sits in warehouses around the world collecting dust. It's a massive volume and we need to solve it.
It's almost tragic, really, isn't it?
It just, you know, it's tragic, but clearly it's an inefficiency between supply and demand. Because there's still a massive amount of demand. The supply is there and people are searching on our platform every day. And our demand has been, I mean, almost even more than we can keep up with. So So if we can correct that inefficiency, we can solve this.
Yeah, absolutely. And with more, more people coming on board, I mean, I bet there are people out there who don't know what Queen of Raw is at this stage, you know. Hopefully that changes and, you know, in a year's time you guys are known by every single player so that these inefficiencies can be corrected.
That's the dream and the goal. And a lot of people, of course, we've got our great brands and retailers who have been supporting us from the beginning. I personally love going after the hot messes. And the big fast fashion retailers and the ones who aren't thinking about sustainability. And some people in the sustainability community are like, "Oh, why do you want to work with them?" Why? Because if I can change just 1% of the way they do things, the impact that that would have is massive. So I know that we can solve it for them.
Absolutely. I mean, there must be so many things that you do. I mean, for you right now, what is the most exciting thing that you do in your world?
No, I think, you know, it never ceases to amaze me when we get outreach from, I mean, people around the world and across the globe, like contacts from Asia and areas where, you know, we haven't spent any money yet in PR marketing or advertising. And when you have a robust community in China that's starting to reach out to you and needs and wants your solution and you're solving a real problem for them, I mean, that for any startup gives you a thrill. Of course, there are challenges. There are always challenges every day, but working through those challenges and solving them, I think, is what keeps us going.
Absolutely. Not to put you on the spot, but can you give me a challenge that you solved recently?
You bet. So one of the biggest challenges that we get asked all the time is, we're selling fabrics in the digital space. These are incredibly— I mean, we're a tactile industry. We need to touch, we need to feel, we need to understand the properties of what it is. How do you translate that into the digital space? And it's a problem we've been looking at and examining and doing different tools with. And we are very excited to be revealing very soon a solution so that it actually makes it not necessary for you to physically touch a swatch or sample, which creates so much waste and time inefficiencies and all these other problems anyways, and understand in the digital space the feeling of that fabric. So once we get that out, you know, you may never need to go to a fabric store again, although it is fun once in a while to go and play in a fabric store.
It's hard, isn't it? Because you'll never replace touch. You can't make— there's a difference. There's a reason that there are things that are digital and there are things that are analog, and that is life, you know. So there's something that you can't replace, but you can get very close.
Yes, you can. And make it almost unnecessary at that point. And for the person who can't touch it, it's actually a time and a money ad, maybe they can't fly somewhere and touch it or have a fashion district nearby enough for them to do it or wait for a sample or the sample doesn't match the actual production lot anyway. So this removes a lot of those inefficiencies and saves a lot of time and money.
Yeah, absolutely. The pros outweigh the cons quite significantly.
Yeah.
Fantastic. Stephanie, is there anything that I haven't asked you want to get off your chest? I mean, you've got all these big things happening. You've got your launch of digital fabrics. Is there anything else that is exciting going on?
I think, you know, whenever I hear all of these amazing brands and retailers saying, you know, we're going to be 100% sustainable or total zero waste to landfill, that is so incredible. And we are so proud of people coming out and saying that. But we recognize and realize that it is hard to get there, that there are older established ways of doing things, especially for large organizations. And I just want to put out there for the big brands and retailers that it is 100% possible to start adopting solutions that will ultimately get you there, but that don't actually cost you more money to implement. Things like our solution are quick, easy, and actually make you money while also saving you money and still fulfill that sustainable proposition. And it's one step, and we believe it's the first biggest key step to getting to that ultimate goal. So again, never doubt that you can do it and go change the world. And save and make a lot of money doing it.
Fantastic. Well, pleasure has been speaking to you.
Thank you very much. Appreciate it. Thank you.
