Reflecting a new vision for sustainable, ethical and inspirational material sourcing, Europe’s newly launched responsible sourcing show, Source Fashion, brings 150 accredited and audited manufacturers from key global sourcing regions together with retailers, brands and designers looking to source new products responsibly and sustainably. In a step toward helping with circularity, the show has also partnered with The Salvation Army Trading Company to bring its Fibersort recycling/reuse services into the mix.
The inaugural show, debuting Feb. 12-14, 2023 at Olympia London, features everything from raw materials, fabrics, trims and packaging to contract manufacturers offering in house design services. Source Fashion is run by Hyve Group, and runs parallel to the show Pure London. It immediately follows sourcing platform Source Home + Gift, which ran Feb. 5-8, 2023 at NEC Birmingham.
Both shows take a comprehensive, global view to sourcing. At Source Fashion, for example, pavilions from Peru, India, China, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Cambodia, Lithuania, Portugal, Sri Lanka, the UAE, Uzbekistan, Turkey, the UK and more make buyer navigation easier and also highlight specialties of each region.
The Peru Pavilion, showing in the UK for the first time, will feature six exhibitors showing alpaca wool, cotton and other natural mixtures. The Indian Pavilion, collaborating with the Wool and Woollens Export Promotion Council, will showcase 20 established garment and textile exporters specializing in wool, woolen and acrylic fibers. The China Pavilion will feature Chinese manufacturers ranging from full garment manufacturing through to raw materials, fabrics, cashmere and components.
Related Stories
Partnering with Salvation Army Trading Co.
In a Source Fashion exclusive, the show just announced a collaboration with the Salvation Army Trading Company (SATCoL), the largest charity-owned textiles collector in the UK, to help retailers actively reduce their carbon footprints. As founding signatories of SCAP 2012 and Textiles 2030, SATCoL has contributed to significant reductions in environmental impacts caused by textiles. More than 350,000 tons of clothing have been diverted to good use since 2012.
SATCoL will showcase its “game-changing” Fibersort textile recycling technology, which repurposes and resupplies recycled materials into established supply chains.
“Reusing clothing is a crucial way to divert significant volumes; each year we prevent around 62,000 tons of clothing and home textiles from being disposed,” said Charlene Bent, marketing manager, SATCoL. “The more second-hand clothing we can process through our existing channels and through recycling systems such as Fibersort, the more potential we have to reclaim and, work[ing] with our retail partners, to ‘resupply’ more recycled materials into established supply chains.”
Fibersort’s automated technology identifies and sorts second-hand textiles by fiber type, blend and color, ensuring that garments are accurately separated for recycling. The system is the first in the UK to sort post-consumer garments that can no longer be reworn, according to Source Fashion, and is a more reliable method than manual sorting. The technology, which sorts 1 piece per second, is based on a combination of NIR (Near-Infrared) and RGB camera technology, used to analyze fiber and color composition, respectively.
Suzanne Ellingham, director of sourcing, Source Fashion, sees this as a major step to help companies be more circular. “Partnerships and collaborations like this one with SATCoL are the future of sourcing and circularity and demonstrate the ethos behind launching Source Fashion,” she said.