OUR IMPACT

 

WE THINK THERE IS ENOUGH FABRIC IN THE WORLD..

92 million tonnes of textiles are discarded globally every year.¹ We don’t think the answer is to make more.

We think it’s to make better use of what already exists.Deadstock is where OhSevenDays began.

When we launched the brand in Istanbul, fabric was our biggest obstacle. As a small, independent label, we couldn’t meet the minimum quantities demanded by traditional fabric suppliers.

We spent our first season negotiating for tiny “sample” quantities, promising we’d come back and buy in bulk one day.

Then we discovered what was happening just down the road. Istanbul is one of the world’s great textile capitals, producing fabric for some of the biggest fashion manufacturers in the world.And around the city, we found warehouses and workshops filled with rolls of beautiful, perfectly usable fabric that had already been produced — but had never found a home.

Some were leftovers from large production runs. Some had been over-ordered or miscalculated.

Others had minor faults, colour variations or simply been passed over when a collection changed direction. To the conventional fashion system, they were surplus.

To us, they were a resource.So we built our business around them.Instead of commissioning new fabric for every collection, we start with what already exists.

We search Istanbul’s textile ecosystem for limited quantities of high-quality surplus fabric, then let those materials influence what we design.

In other words, the fabric comes first; the design follows.This changes the way we create clothes. Quantities are naturally limited.

Collections are compact. A fabric we love might only be enough for 30 dresses, or 100 pairs of trousers — and when it’s gone, it’s gone. Rather than seeing this as a limitation, we see it as part of the character of the brand.


From leftover to loved.

In our early years, we sourced through Istanbul’s network of deadstock dealers and fabric merchants.

As the brand grew, we developed relationships directly with fabric mills, giving us greater visibility into where our materials come from and allowing us to build a more consistent, transparent sourcing model.

Today, we work with OEKO-TEX-certified mills and seek out materials carrying recognised certifications including GOTS, GRS, OCS and European Flax.

We favour natural and lower-impact fibres wherever possible, while also working with recycled and regenerated materials.Of course, using deadstock doesn’t magically make a garment sustainable.

We still have to consider how a fabric was made, who made the garment, how long it will last and what happens when it is no longer wanted.

But there is something powerful about starting with a material that already exists.Every metre we reclaim is a metre that doesn’t need to be produced again.

Every roll we rescue is a small rejection of the idea that fashion always needs to start from scratch.

We’re not trying to create more stuff for the sake of creating more stuff.

We’re trying to take what’s already here — the beautiful, the imperfect, the forgotten and the overlooked — and give it another life.