Profile | Can clothes 3D-woven on demand curb fashion’s climate impact? Hong Kong entrepreneur’s bet
- Walden Lam shares how his sustainable fashion company Unspun makes clothes using 3D weaving that cut out waste and cut their climate impact
Growing up in Hong Kong, Walden Lam didn’t plan on working in fashion, instead believing he would follow the more traditional path of a career in financial services.
He graduated from university in the wake of the 2008 global financial crisis, which was a period of optimism surrounding action on climate change.
He went into consulting, working with utilities companies, and this exposed him to the concepts of supply chains and retail expansion, and matters relating to climate change, particularly in the Asia-Pacific region.
“That’s where I saw first-hand the disconnect between what’s happening on the front end, with channel growth and the supply chain, which is typically quite behind,” Lam says.
He didn’t know it at the time, but his work would lead him towards co-founding Unspun, an innovative textile company that now has some 50 employees, based in Hong Kong, California and London.
Unspun’s speciality is 3D weaving, a production method that creates clothes from yarn without the need for pattern cutting and the associated wasteful offcuts.
