When luxury clothing retailer Burberry burned millions of dollars worth of items that it couldn’t sell, it caused an uproar. Destroying excess fabric is rampant in the industry, but Stephanie Benedetto may have come up with a solution.
Her business, Queen of Raw, offers an online marketplace for buying and selling fabrics that might otherwise go to waste.
The New Yorker says there’s $120 billion worth of excess fabric sitting in warehouses around the world. That costs the factories that made it, the companies that ordered it, and the warehouses that store it. And Benedetto says it also costs the planet.
The textile industry is the second-biggest polluter of clean water in the world, right after oil. That cotton T-shirt you’re wearing as you read this? Benedetto says it took a mind-boggling 700 gallons of water to produce (unless you happen to be wearing an organic shirt, in which case it’s more like 10 gallons). Multiply that by the two billion shirts sold annually across the globe, and you can see the impact this has on the environment.
With Queen of Raw, Benedetto says that businesses can sell their excess raw fabric (hence the name) instead of destroying it. And if the company that buys it ends up not needing it? Well, it can sell it to another firm.
“Buyers become sellers and sellers become buyers,” she says.
Benedetto says she’s continuing a family tradition. A century ago, her immigrant grandfather worked in the garment industry on New York City’s Lower East Side. Today, she runs her technology-driven company from New York’s WeWork Empire State.
A former lawyer who specialized in fashion, technology, and other fields, Benedetto started mapping out Queen of Raw on a napkin four years ago. She officially launched this year with cofounder Phil Derasmo, whose Wall Street and startup contacts were a good balance for her fashion industry chops.
Benedetto estimates that by 2025 Queen of Raw could help save more than 4 billion gallons of water and prevent 2 million tons of textiles from going to the landfill. While Queen of Raw strives to have serious social impact, it was important to Benedetto for it to be a for-profit business to show the industry that preventing waste will help their bottom line.
Benedetto knows how hard it is to run a successful startup. But things suddenly got a lot easier on September 13 when she took home the top prize —$360,000—at the Nashville Creator Awards.
“We were a bootstrapped company and it took us all the way to launch,” says Benedetto. “We want to be able to grow and scale beyond the U.S. and around the world.”
Her ultimate goal is to get people—business owners and consumers alike— to stop and think.
“Wherever you are, whatever you are going, the materials in the space you are in—the office, a car, a plane—did not come from nowhere,” says Benedetto. “If everyone thought a little differently about one T-shirt, about sourcing sustainably one thing, that would have a massive impact.”
