Giving textile offcuts purpose – Queen of Raw launches in Australia

Kaycee Enerva

16th Nov 2020

Queen of Raw, an online marketplace for sustainable and deadstock fabrics, is launching in Australia, inviting designers, retailers and consumers to buy and sell unused textiles on its global platform. 

Considered by the UN Conference on Trade and Development to be the second-largest polluter in the world, the fashion industry contributes 1.2 billion tonnes of carbon emissions every year, not to mention unfathomable water wastage. Those are statistics that Queen of Raw co-founder, Stephanie Benedetto is passionately fighting to change. 

With a family in the business for more than 100 years, Benedetto saw the problem firsthand and decided to build the solution: a platform for companies to recapture value from their wasted materials rather than burning them, allowing clothing manufacturers, designers, upholsters, and students to access premium fabrics at a fraction of their retail price. 

Leveraging blockchain technology and machine learning/AI, Queen of Raw intelligently matches buyers with sellers. Unused textiles are sold quickly and easily at lower price points, giving designers access to materials that they never had before.

Queen of Raw also enables sellers to map, measure, and trace their textile waste in real-time, providing actionable data to help them minimise their waste streams going forward. 

Benedetto is fighting to bring that $120 billion worth of unused textiles back to life.

“If we do not make a change, by 2025, two-thirds of the entire world’s population will face shortages of fresh water from textile production alone,” Benedetto explains.

Queen of Raw has already saved more than 1 billion gallons of water while saving businesses millions of dollars with supply chain efficiency. This is a key focus for Benedetto: “An optimised supply chain is the solution for people, for the planet, and for-profit.”

With the launch of Queen of Raw into the Australian market, Benedetto is optimistic and excited about the future impact local designers and retailers can make on minimising textile waste, water consumption, and carbon emissions created by the fashion industry.