Unmade: case study of a bespoke knitwear start-up

Hi, my name's Kirsty Emery, and I'm co-founder and fashion director of Unmade. At Unmade, we give brands the power to tailor their products to each and every customer, using technology and manufacturing.

At the beginning, myself and my two co-founders Hal and Ben, all worked in quite separate areas. Hal and Ben both have engineering backgrounds, and I have a fashion background specializing in knitwear. We all met originally through the Royal College of Art, but after graduating from there in a combination of Women's Wear knitwear and IDA, we all went and worked freelance for various different companies. Whilst doing freelance work, we were given the opportunity to work for UK Sport, working on performance sportswear, specifically for the British Olympic Team. We wanted to make custom garments for each of the Olympians individual to their needs, their body type, and their sport. But to create custom one off garments was incredibly expensive and time needed to create these garments was prohibitive. So we wanted to build a system which would allow that this became a reality and was much more accessible. It was already a system that we saw in other areas so when Hal and Ben worked with either creating circuit boards, xPCBs or if they were building pieces out of wood or metal, they could easily create files for them, get them sent off to any producer, get them made and have them returned in a relatively short period of time, sometimes as little as 24 hours. Within the knitwear industry, this just wasn't a possibility. So whilst I was working freelance for small companies, I would regularly have to wait a week to two weeks just to get the raw materials before I could start producing something. So we wanted to change this.