As of July 19, 2026, it's now illegal for large companies operating in the EU to destroy unsold clothing and shoes - burning or landfilling stock instead of selling it or finding another use for it. It's a genuinely significant shift for an industry that has quietly destroyed unsold inventory for years, and it's the kind of headline that made us stop and think about our own approach.
We've never had an "unsold inventory" problem to solve, mostly because we've never built the business to have one. Everything we make runs through the same small, local supply chain - labels from Markham, waistband and thread from Montreal, sewn in Scarborough - which means we can't exactly order a warehouse's worth of stock and hope it moves. We make what we can reasonably expect to sell, in batches small enough that Sarah's team can keep an eye on quality the whole way through.
That quality check does still catch the occasional pair that isn't right: a stitch out of place, a print that didn't line up - and that number has gone way down as our process has gotten tighter, but it's never zero. Those don't get thrown out either. We donate them to programs that get them to people who need them.
That's not us claiming some grand sustainability win. It's mostly just what happens when your supply chain is close enough to see. But watching a regulation get written to stop something we were never going to do anyway is a decent reminder that the boring, unglamorous way of doing this - small runs, close to home - was worth the trade-off.
-Sarah+Rob
Source: European Commission - Ban on destruction of unsold clothes and shoes enters into application