Visiting different shopping malls in one of the world’s richest capitals, filled with luxury, fast-fashion and other brand shops, was a recent shock that I was forced to encounter and spend a significant part of my spare time thinking about. Hundreds of square footage of space filled with hundreds of stores. Stores filled with merchandise.
Most of it apparel and shoes. In that specific geographical context, a city of about 2 million people could be fully clothed from scratch and still the shops would have tons more merchandise to sell. With the naked eye, without statistical data, without calculators and computers, without data on income, prices and sales, it was very obvious to me that shops do not sell all of their merchandise.
It is impossible; there isn’t enough demand. So what happens to all this stuff that is being peddled out there after it has not been sold? Well, one educated or experienced or simply smart guess would be that it remains in stock and is promoted again during sales or clearance periods. This, in fact, is correct.
But it is only partly correct. Because even after the sales and after the clearance, there is still merchandise left over as stock. So what happens to it then? According to a recent report by the European Environment Agency (EEA) (2024), an estimated 20% of all merchandise in the textile and clothing sector, produced in the EU, remains unsold after crossing all the possible stages of the consumption path.
In 2022, this sector reached a tur.
