{"slug": "this-designer-is-using-ai-to-make-clothing-with-zero-fabric-waste", "title": "This designer is using AI to make clothing with zero fabric waste", "summary": "Shelly Xu's startup Shelly Xu Design (SXD) has developed AI software that reengineers clothing patterns to eliminate cut-and-sew fabric waste, which accounts for 10-15% of fabric loss in garment manufacturing. The company closed a $4.5 million pre-seed round led by Initialized Capital and has partnerships with H&M Foundation and major retailers, aiming to scale zero-waste fashion production.", "body_md": "Walk onto the cutting floor of almost any garment factory in the world and you’ll see rolls of fabric laid out in stacks. A technician arranges a pattern on the cloth to cut out the building blocks for the garment: sleeves, pockets, bodice.\n\nThe problem is that the pieces never fit together perfectly. Around the curves of a sleeve, the notch of a collar, and the taper of a side seam, there are always gaps—slivers and crescents of fabric that must be cut around and swept away. That refuse is known in the industry as [cut-and-sew waste](https://bren.ucsb.edu/sites/default/files/2024-04/Examining%20Cut-and-Sew%20Textile%20Waste%20within%20the%20Apparel%20Supply%20Chain%204.10.24.pdf). Most consumers never think about it, because it happens long before a garment reaches a store.\n\nBut it adds up to one of fashion’s biggest yet least-discussed problems. By industry estimates, somewhere between [10% and 15% of fabric](https://bren.ucsb.edu/sites/default/files/2024-04/Examining%20Cut-and-Sew%20Textile%20Waste%20within%20the%20Apparel%20Supply%20Chain%204.10.24.pdf) is lost in the cutting process. The waste matters because fabric is the single most expensive input in a garment, accounting [for up to 70% of the total cost](https://shanghaigarment.com/how-to-save-fabric-cost-as-a-garment-manufacturer/) of making it. And it matters environmentally, because every discarded scrap embodies the water, energy, and carbon emissions required to make it.\n\nShelly Xu wants to drive that fabric waste number to zero. Her company, Shelly Xu Design (SXD), is a 15-person startup building [AI](https://www.fastcompany.com/section/artificial-intelligence) software that reengineers clothing patterns so the pieces interlock like [puzzle](https://www.fastcompany.com/games/mini-crossword) parts, leaving nothing behind. Crucially, it doesn’t ask factories to change their process; it fits seamlessly into the current system.\n\n“It doesn’t change how people actually sew cloth together,” Xu says. “You’re just cutting them into different shapes so that they take up less space on the fabric.”\n\nSXD just closed an oversubscribed $4.5 million pre-seed round led by Initialized Capital. After four years of building the technology, the company is ready to scale.\n\nSXD has partnerships with the H&M Foundation and the Coop bookstores at Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, just signed a multiyear deal with one of the largest music record labels to convert tour merch to zero waste, and is preparing to launch with a European apparel group whose clients range from Uniqlo to Ralph Lauren.\n\nXu traces the whole idea of her company to the very small apartment she grew up in. She was raised in Hefei, in China’s Anhui province, not far from Nanjing. The home she shared with her parents was just a few hundred square feet, so fitting life into it became a daily puzzle. They slept on bed rolls that had to be folded and put away in the morning, and they bought only enough groceries for the next meal or two.\n\nXu also watched green spaces near her home become dumping grounds. “I saw firsthand how detrimental waste can be,” she says.\n\nThese experiences taught her to see limitation as a design challenge. She often invokes Piccaso’s line that restraint is what liberates invention. Limited resources, in Xu’s view, aren’t a hindrance to good design. “Really good designs can come from the idea that we live with limited resources on our planet,” she says.\n\nTo pursue these ideas, Xu studied sustainable development at Columbia University, where she explored how to bring more eco-friendly approaches to fashion. She also taught herself to design clothing and to code, then began building a platform that would allow designers to create zero-waste clothing patterns.\n\nTo test the technology, she designed a small collection of zero-waste outfits, stitched 200 garments by hand, and created an [Instagram account](https://www.instagram.com/shellyxudesign/?hl=en) to showcase them. Shelly Xu Design quickly amassed 20,000 Instagram followers, buyers paid thousands of dollars for her pieces, and the collection sold out.\n\nXu deliberately didn’t highlight the sustainability aspect of her garment-making process; she wanted to show that it’s possible to create beautiful clothes that also happen to generate zero waste. “Even without people knowing its sustainable, people should be able to tell it’s a good design,” she says.\n\nThe overwhelming positive response convinced Xu that there is a business in this technology. While software companies like Lectra and Dassault Systèmes are working to reduce cutting-room waste in apparel manufacturing, none have yet achieved zero-waste designs. So Xu enrolled at Harvard Business School to determine how to create a profitable business.\n\n“People like myself who love making great products, we can be some of the worst businesspeople, because we’re not thinking about how to create a business that can sustain itself,” she says.\n\nWhen she graduated in 2021, the nascent SDX won [Harvard’s New Venture Competition](https://www.hbs.edu/newventurecompetition), taking both the grand prize and the crowd favorite award, in a contest whose past winners include Grab, the Uber of Southeast Asia.\n\nThanks to this award, Harvard professors introduced her to experts who could help her build her company. The dean of engineering connected her to [Takeo Igarashi](https://www-ui.is.s.u-tokyo.ac.jp/~takeo/), an AI professor at the University of Tokyo, who helped her think through the software. Xu went on to [hire](https://www.fastcompany.com/section/hiring) his student, research engineer [Maria Larsson](https://www.ma-la.com/). The company built software that uses AI to translate any garment into a zero-waste design.\n\nIn many ways, the cut-and-sew process of making a garment is still very old-fashioned. Most factories rely on established patterns for cutting garments from cloth, which a garment worker then sews on a machine. Technicians try to conserve as much fabric as possible, but even with digital tools, it’s common to waste a tenth or more of the fabric. Xu sees this as a mathematical challenge.\n\n“Some factories are using apparel patterns that haven’t changed in literally centuries,” she says. Her software maps exactly how much fabric it has to work with, then arranges the pieces in unconventional configurations that shrink waste to 1% or less.\n\nSince then, the team has taken on even thornier problems, such as sizing. A single design might need to exist in a dozen sizes, from toddler to plus-size. Up until now, Xu says, “you had to manually redesign every single pattern for every single size. Our platform does it in seconds, with the push of a button.”\n\nAt first, SXD stuck to geometric shapes that are easier to translate into zero-waste designs. Now Xu’s team is working to build tools that will enable the design of zero-waste garments with curves, like tapered sleeves or trouser legs. “The idea with zero-waste design was that it was always just rectangles,” Xu says. “We’re pushing back against that.”\n\nOne of SXD’s earliest partnerships was with the Harvard Coop, the university’s bookstore, whose branded merchandise is popular among students and tourists. She started with a tall vertical tote bag with interior pockets and reinforced straps made from scraps that would usually be discarded.\n\n“When you create a tote, the corners are usually cut out and wasted,” Xu says. “So we decided to use that corner as a reinforcement for the straps.” The bag uses 30% less material than a conventional tote, wastes nothing, and is made from deadstock fabric that would otherwise have ended up in a landfill.\n\nThe totes sold out quickly, so the Coop asked Xu to make branded T-shirts and aprons. Those, too, sold out within weeks, and SXD is scrambling to restock. This September, MIT has tapped SXD to create products for its flagship conference, MIT Solve.\n\nThe Harvard and MIT collections were proving grounds—a way to test zero-waste design and get the company off the ground. Its ambitions are now far bigger. SXD is working with Indonesia’s Busana Apparel Group, one of the world’s largest manufacturers, which churns out nearly 2 million men’s shirts per month. Converting that volume to zero waste would spare staggering quantities of fabric.\n\nXu is also moving into the automotive industry. Automotive fabric is so expensive that suppliers battle to save every scrap, celebrating the smallest gains. “For some customers, the goal is to save 1%,” she says. “But we’ve shown we can save more than 20%, which is an enormous cost savings.”\n\nFor years, environmental activists have implored consumers to buy fewer clothing items and wear them longer. The message has reached some, but changing consumer behavior on a large scale has proven very hard. The beauty of this zero-waste technology is that it asks nothing of shoppers. The shirt looks the same, fits the same, and costs the same. And yet the garment lands with a far smaller environmental footprint.\n\nAs Xu says, “You’re able to create something that’s just as, if not more, desirable—using half the material.”", "url": "https://wpnews.pro/news/this-designer-is-using-ai-to-make-clothing-with-zero-fabric-waste", "canonical_source": "https://www.fastcompany.com/91571293/shelly-xu-designs-sustainable-fashion-ai", "published_at": "2026-07-14 10:00:00+00:00", "updated_at": "2026-07-14 10:18:03.756659+00:00", "lang": "en", "topics": ["artificial-intelligence", "ai-startups", "ai-products", "ai-tools"], "entities": ["Shelly Xu", "Shelly Xu Design", "SXD", "Initialized Capital", "H&M Foundation", "Harvard University", "Massachusetts Institute of Technology", "Uniqlo"], "alternates": {"html": "https://wpnews.pro/news/this-designer-is-using-ai-to-make-clothing-with-zero-fabric-waste", "markdown": "https://wpnews.pro/news/this-designer-is-using-ai-to-make-clothing-with-zero-fabric-waste.md", "text": "https://wpnews.pro/news/this-designer-is-using-ai-to-make-clothing-with-zero-fabric-waste.txt", "jsonld": "https://wpnews.pro/news/this-designer-is-using-ai-to-make-clothing-with-zero-fabric-waste.jsonld"}}