Deadstock Fabric

What is deadstock fabric?  Deadstock isn’t a word you come upon every day. When you hear it, it doesn’t exactly bring to mind beautiful clothing and environmental wellness. But, that’s exactly what it means to us at Brooks LTD.

You might ask, “What exactly is deadstock?”. Good question, dear reader!  Deadstock is the surplus fabric manufacturers(including our own brand) haven’t used during their production process. Basically in our mind, really pretty leftovers. In the past, these fabrics often found their way into landfills, adding to the already overloaded and damaging textile waste supply. Since companies need to clear out this extra material to maintain their low-cost inventories, small businesses like Brooks LTD., are able to purchase these fabric remains.  This keeps the textiles out of landfills and instead, using them to create new designs for their customers. In addition, other deadstock fabric could be a quilt top your Great Grandmother made and you’ve stored it in a chest of drawers.  We can fix that, read what we’ve done with one client’s textile she wanted to be made into a wearable here. 

Sustainability and style

Sustainability and style are pillars to the design process at Brooks LTD. Our goal is always to create clothing that is unique, comfortable and easy-to-wear. Using deadstock fabric  in conjunction with modern fabrics allows us to do just that.  This simultaneously limits textile waste and lowers the environmental impact of the garment industry. It’s a win-win and keeps us authentic to our aesthetic.

We always select notable fabrics to use in our designs so most everything we create using deadstock is one-of-a-kind. There’s just not enough of the extra material to mass produce any particular item. We take a couple approaches to working with our beautiful deadstock fabrics. Sometimes we use the entire piece of deadstock to create a special item like this linen duster. The fabric was leftover from a home goods store and we added hand stitching and beautiful appliques to create a fun, seasonless topper.  See this piece here.

Other times, we may have smaller amounts of modern textiles that we combine with different fabrics to create a patchwork effect. The Ida shirt is a great example of this technique – we combined the excess modern fabric from garments we made last year with vintage tablecloths. This allowed us to add fun details like the accents at the wrist and the attention-getting back to a simple style making a piece that is easy and fun to wear.  See more of this piece here.

Our priority

I hope this has given you some insight to how we create pieces for our customers that can never be duplicated thanks to the use of deadstock. And how reducing the amount of textile waste is a priority for us at Brooks LTD. Utilizing deadstock allows us to do our part for the environment, it pushes us creatively, and ends up resulting in unique and exceptional clothing for our cherished customers to enjoy for years to come.