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How a Startup Is Collapsing a 200-Year-Old Supply Chain

by Mike Knispel | Carryology Editor-in-Chief, April 21, 2026

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In a world changing at breakneck speed, one corner of the fashion industry has remained fundamentally still. And it&rsquo;s not the materials — those have transformed dramatically. Nor the marketing, the retail models, or the sustainability messaging. Those evolve season by season. What hasn&rsquo;t changed is the thing that happens in the middle: the actual making of the clothes.

The process is called cut and sew. And in its basic form, it is the same process that clothed the industrial revolution.

Fabric is woven flat. Patterns are cut out. The pieces are shipped to a factory, where workers stitch them together, one seam at a time. The finished garment is packed, warehoused, and shipped — often across multiple continents — to a shelf stocked months in advance based on somebody&rsquo;s best guess about what you might want to buy.

It is a system built for a world of cheap labour, long lead times, and acceptable waste. And the waste is enormous. Not just the 15 to 20 percent of fabric left on the cutting room floor — but the garments made before anyone wanted them, that sat in warehouses, got discounted, got liquidated, got burned. The fashion industry accounts for up to 10% of global carbon emissions annually. A significant chunk of that isn&rsquo;t from what we wear. It&rsquo;s from how speculatively it gets made.

For two hundred years, nobody has fundamentally changed that. Sustainable materials get value-engineered out. Ethical supply chains get undercut by cheaper ones. The machine keeps running because stopping it, even briefly, is expensive.

But a small startup in the Bay Area thinks it has built something that doesn&rsquo;t ask the industry to stop. Just to swap out the machine.

But, you see, something similar has come before…

The Machine That Almost Changed Everything

The technology to do better has existed for decades.

In 1995, Japanese company Shima Seiki introduced the WHOLEGARMENT&reg; knitting machine — capable of knitting an entire garment in three dimensions in a single pass, with no panels, no seams, no skilled linking required. It built the garment in the round, shaping it as it went, with nothing left on the floor. In 2012, Nike used the same principle for the Flyknit upper, claiming to reduce manufacturing waste by 60% compared to conventional construction. A handful of luxury knitwear brands quietly adopted the technology for premium lines.

And then the broader industry moved on. The speculative, high-volume, low-margin model that drives most fashion has very little incentive to invest in a slower, more considered way of making things. The machine existed. The will to use it at scale did not.

The problem has been understood for thirty years. The solution has been sitting in Japanese factories for thirty years. What&rsquo;s changed is who&rsquo;s now trying to apply the same logic to the far larger, far more wasteful world of woven garments — the jeans, chinos, and trousers that make up the bulk of what the industry actually produces.

Meet Vega

Unspun is a Bay Area startup that has spent years building a machine called Vega&trade;. It takes thousands of individual yarns and weaves them directly into a finished, seamless three-dimensional textile. No cutting. No sewing. No eleven-step supply chain. Yarn goes in, trousers come out — in under ten minutes.

That&rsquo;s the number worth sitting with. The conventional denim supply chain, from cotton field to finished jean, takes months and crosses the globe multiple times. Vega produces a finished woven trouser in under ten minutes, in a single location, from a single input.

Co-founder Beth Esponnette describes it simply: like a basket-making machine, but for clothes. Thousands of warp threads are routed into Vega&rsquo;s weaving core, and the machine builds the garment in three dimensions directly from yarn —...