Editor’s note: This article was originally published on Eluxe Magazine and has been updated and republished in August 2026 under The Vessel’s editorial standards.
Fashion buying is one of those roles that sounds enviable from the outside — selecting styles, forecasting trends, spending a retailer’s budget on the season’s most promising pieces. The reality is considerably harder. Buyers must anticipate which colours, fabrics and silhouettes will sell months before they reach the floor, with no reliable way to account for shifts in consumer sentiment, economic conditions or even an unseasonably warm autumn that kills demand for coats.
No matter how skilled a buyer may be, every season produces a residue of unsold stock. What happens to those clothes varies enormously between retailers, and the options range from genuinely constructive to quietly indefensible.
The spectrum of options for dead stock
Retailers handle excess inventory in several ways, and the approach tends to reflect the brand’s market position as much as any ethical commitment.
- Many mid-market shops channel dead stock to discount retailers such as TK Maxx, or to online off-price platforms like the Outnet, where garments are sold at a markdown rather than destroyed.
- Others run periodic online clearance sales or operate their own outlet stores where last season’s merchandise moves at reduced prices.
- Some retailers donate to charitable organisations such as Oxfam or The Salvation Army. Larger brands typically remove their labels before donating — a brand-protection measure — and often offer employees a heavily discounted first pick before anything leaves the building.
- A handful of brands have built return and recycling programmes directly into their retail model. Nudie Jeans accepts worn denim at its stores and issues a discount coupon in exchange; Levi’s sews a “Care Tag for Our Planet” into each garment, encouraging customers to donate it when they’re done with it.
- Classic, season-neutral styles — cable-knit knitwear being the obvious example — are sometimes warehoused and reintroduced the following year rather than discounted or destroyed.
- Some retailers upcycle slow-moving stock by adding embellishments or structural modifications, then re-merchandise it as a new product.
- The Kering group has taken a more structurally interesting approach: rather than incinerating surplus fabrics from labels including Alexander McQueen and Saint Laurent, the group has donated those textiles to emerging designers such as Sakina M’Sa, who can incorporate them into new collections.
- Damaged garments are sometimes picked up from charitable organisations by textile recovery companies such as Trans-Americas, which either resells clothing into developing-country markets or converts it into industrial rags.
Destruction as brand strategy
The most damaging end of the spectrum involves deliberate destruction. The rationale is brand integrity: if a garment cannot be sold at full price, the logic goes, it should not exist in the market at any price. Houses built on scarcity have long been reluctant to discount at all, on the basis that markdowns signal cheapness. Reporting on the practice has described goods being destroyed over even the smallest imperfections, and surplus textiles burned specifically so that no one else can use or copy them.
The best-documented case is Burberry, which disclosed in its July 2018 earnings statement that it had destroyed £28.6 million of unsold goods over the preceding financial year. After the disclosure drew sustained criticism, the company announced in September 2018 that it would stop burning unsold stock and would donate or reuse it instead. The episode is worth dwelling on precisely because the figure only became public through a routine financial disclosure — the practice was not otherwise visible to customers, and there is no equivalent public accounting for most of the industry.
Exclusivity as a brand strategy has drawn similar criticism outside the luxury tier. Abercrombie & Fitch spent much of the early 2010s defending a positioning built explicitly on who its clothes were not for, and in 2013 the writer and filmmaker Greg Karber responded with a campaign that distributed the brand’s garments to homeless people — a pointed inversion of its own exclusivity messaging.
Abercrombie was not alone. In 2010, the New York Times reported that H&M had been dumping rubbish bags of deliberately slashed, unsold clothing outside its stores, rendering the garments unwearable before disposal. Walmart was also reported to have tossed out large quantities of discarded garments at its Herald Square location in Manhattan.
The financial weight of dead inventory
Dead stock is not merely an ethical problem — it is an expensive operational one. Disposing of unsold merchandise, or paying to store it, has been estimated to cost retailers in the United States alone in the region of $50 billion a year. That figure does not include the upstream costs of producing clothing that never reaches a consumer, nor the environmental costs of disposal.
It has also stopped being a purely voluntary matter. Under the EU’s Ecodesign for Sustainable Products Regulation, a ban on destroying unsold clothes, clothing accessories and footwear entered into application on 19 July 2026 for large companies operating in the EU. Medium-sized companies come under the same rules in 2030, and small and micro-businesses are exempt from the accompanying record-keeping requirements. Destruction is no longer a discretionary commercial choice for the largest brands in the European market — they are required to prioritise resale, donation or preparation for reuse.
Technology as an inventory management tool
A range of technology platforms have emerged to help retailers reduce the volume of dead stock generated in the first place, primarily by improving the accuracy of purchasing decisions and giving consumers more visibility before production runs are committed.
Improvements to e-commerce infrastructure have enabled pre-order and made-to-demand models, where retailers gauge actual consumer intent before manufacturing at scale. This reduces the speculative overproduction that creates dead stock in the first instance.
RotaryView offers a 360-degree, high-resolution product viewer that lets shoppers examine an item from every angle before buying, reducing the returns and guesswork that contribute to markdowns. Nextail helps retailers optimise stock levels by improving their daily allocation and replenishment decisions. Inturn enabled brands to sell surplus stock to other retailers through private online showrooms, keeping garments in circulation rather than directing them toward disposal.
These tools address the inefficiency that generates dead stock, but they are not a complete solution. They depend on adoption across a fragmented global supply chain, and they do not resolve the deliberate destruction practised by brands for whom scarcity is a marketing instrument rather than an operational accident.
The consumer side of the equation
The conversation about unsold clothes tends to focus on what retailers do — reasonably, given the volumes involved. But consumer behaviour is part of the same system. Buying in excess of actual need, purchasing trend-driven pieces that will not be worn more than once or twice, and failing to dispose of garments responsibly at end of life all contribute to the broader problem of textile waste.
Swapping, donating to charity, and buying secondhand are established ways to extend the useful life of clothing that would otherwise move toward landfill. Choosing not to buy garments that are unlikely to see regular wear is among the more direct contributions an individual can make to reducing the overall volume of clothing that ends up as waste.
The old adage holds for businesses and individuals alike: the less you buy, the less you waste.
