Surplus inventory in the fashion industry seems like a chronic waste of time and money, even more so for emerging brands, who, by getting their numbers wrong could find themselves in dire straits. With the wealth of readily accessible data available, getting these numbers wrong seems even more unnecessarily wasteful.

A new e-commerce site called Nineteenth Amendment is providing a service that allows shoppers to browse new lines by emerging designers from around the world. However, production of the garments on sale won’t start until 10 orders for each have been placed. Not only does this allow the shopper to get wholesale prices during the 45-day seasonal sales window, but means the designer doesn’t get stuck with loads of unwanted stock.

If the sales window is over or shoppers want to buy something fast (usual turnaround is three weeks), garments can be ‘bought now’ at retail price, and manufactured immediately in the USA.

This isn’t the first example we've seen of data being used in the fashion industry to streamline the production process.  Theorum is another e-commerce company that has created a platform for merchants to negotiate the price of items and sell them to consumers. The site lets consumers name their own price on any given product, compiles the valuations, and presents the data on a dashboard for the merchant.