Excessive water usage and textile waste generation significantly increase the apparel industry’s environmental footprint. As a result, the industry is undergoing transformative changes. A wave of innovative new apparel companies is reshaping the industry with the incorporation of artificial intelligence (AI), 3D technologies, blockchain, and more. They enhance apparel manufacturing and marketing as well as promote sustainable clothing practices.
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Key Takeaways
Drawing insights from the Big Data & AI-powered StartUs Insights Discovery Platform that provides data on over 4.7+ million emerging companies globally, we explore the evolving landscape of the apparel industry. This sector is marked by key trends and a substantial workforce, shaping its future. Here are some key insights at a glance:
- Latest Apparel Industry Trends: Notable trends in the apparel sector include sustainable clothing, deployment of AI, smart fabrics, immersive fashion, and additive manufacturing.
- Apparel Industry Stats: The global apparel industry comprises 313K+ organizations and has a massive 17.7M workforce. It has faced a decline of 0.76% in annual growth rate but has witnessed the emergence of 19K+ new apparel companies over the past 5 years.
- 10 Top Apparel Companies to Watch:
- OceanSafe – Synthetic Textile Alternatives
- Clothing Tech – 3D Clothing Platform
- LAYBL – Cloth Traceability
- Dhakai – Interactive Phygital Tags
- Funktion* – Modular Smart Clothing
- Meryl Fabrics – Polyamide & Elastane-based Sustainable Fabrics
- Fashinza – Apparel Sourcing & Trend Forecasting
- All Win One – Communication Platform
- Frontier.cool – 3D Fabric Sourcing Platform
- Ambaram – Product Lifecycle Management (PLM)
Discover 10 Out of 19K+ Emerging Apparel Companies
In this section, we spotlight 10 emerging apparel companies pioneering innovative design solutions. These companies are at the forefront of responding to evolving market demands and addressing environmental concerns. By leveraging 3D technologies, RFID tags, and sustainable fabrics, these companies are transforming the apparel industry.
Note on Signal Strength
One of the unique metrics we feature for each company is Signal Strength, a proprietary data point generated by our Discovery Platform. Signal Strength gauges the extent to which a company’s influence has permeated the global ecosystem of startups, scaleups, and emerging companies. This proprietary metric serves as a valuable guidepost for understanding a company’s standing in the broader market landscape.
1. OceanSafe
- Founding Year: 2019
- Employee Range: 11-50
- Location: Switzerland
- Signal Strength: Very Strong
- What they do: OceanSafe develops circular synthetic textile replacements for conventional polyester and cotton. These materials are fully biodegradable, recyclable, and free of hazardous substances. Further, the company converts returned products into nutrients and biogas using industrial composting or chemical recycling processes. OceanSafe thus enables clothing brands and manufacturers to create circular finished products to address environmental and health-related issues.
2. Clothing Tech
- Founding Year: 2019
- Employee Range: 11-50
- Location: USA
- Signal Strength: Very Strong
- What they do: Clothing Tech offers a 3D clothing platform that allows designers to manage time effectively. Using AI, the platform automates tasks such as patternmaking, draping, digital sewing, tech pack creation, and costing. This allows teams to develop and maintain customized digital libraries of trims, fabrics, patterns, and finishes. The company’s platform enhances communication, minimizes sample waste, fosters stronger collaboration, and accelerates time-to-market.
3. LAYBL
- Founding Year: 2021
- Employee Range: 2-10
- Location: UK
- Signal Strength: Very Strong
- What they do: LAYBL provides a circularity platform that enables clothing brands to track products throughout their entire lifecycle using unique digital IDs. It provides real-time access to wear frequency, performance data, transfer of ownership, and end-of-life status. The startup’s solution promotes sustainability and enhances brand-consumer connections by enabling clothing resale, repair, rental, reuse, or recycling, supported by advanced analytics and insights.
4. Dhakai
- Founding Year: 2020
- Employee Range: 11-50
- Location: USA
- Signal Strength: Very Strong
- What they do: Dhakai develops interactive tags for apparel brands to customize their products and engage customers. The tags serve as a means of product authentication, ensuring trust and quality. Further, this solution enables brands to track customer engagement and gather valuable data on preferences, demographics, and campaign effectiveness. Moreover, customers scan the tags to access exclusive content such as AR experiences, product information, or personalized messages. Dhakai thus allows brands to foster deeper connections and drive customer loyalty through immersive experiences.
5. Funktion*
- Founding Year: 2020
- Employee Range: 2-10
- Location: Germany
- Signal Strength: Strong
- What they do: Funktion* integrates smart functions into clothing design such as a wireless phone charger, air quality monitoring, haptic navigation, and automatic heating. The smart sensors integrated into the clothing enable various motion sensing use cases such as muscle tracking and fall detection while exercising, danger warning and work training in factories, blind spot assistance and crash warning for cycling, and more. Further, the company offers an app to set up products, install functions, and automate workflows.
6. Meryl Fabrics
- Founding Year: 2020
- Employee Range: 11-50
- Location: UK
- Signal Strength: Medium Strong
- What they do: Meryl Fabrics produces sustainable fabrics made of polyamide and elastane. The company utilizes hydrogen bonding to create strong molecular chains, effectively sealing all microfibers within the filaments. Additionally, it employs gentle texturizing processes to provide a softer and warmer touch while preserving the performance properties. The company minimizes microplastic shedding and collaborates with businesses to reduce the environmental footprint of clothing.
7. Fashinza
- Founding Year: 2020
- Employee Range: 201-500
- Location: India
- Signal Strength: Very Strong
- What they do: Fashinza offers an apparel sourcing and trend forecasting platform for fashion brands and retailers. It tracks garment production lifecycles on a dashboard and uses this data to train algorithms that match brands with suppliers. Fashinza utilizes AI to achieve cost savings by optimizing unit economics on the supply side, enhancing production efficiency, and leveraging unutilized capacity. The company also enables brands to find manufacturers easily, place bulk orders, analyze trending fashion designs, and optimize their sales.
8. All Win One
- Founding Year: 2019
- Employee Range: 2-10
- Location: USA
- Signal Strength: Very Strong
- What they do: All Win One provides a communication platform for clothing brands and sewing contractors to streamline workflow. Its collaboration tool significantly reduces mistakes caused by miscommunication and helps in efficient production management. Moreover, this solution matches garment brands to manufacturers and aggregates big data for further optimization. It allows brands to efficiently manage existing clients and recommend new clients with a click.
9. Frontier.cool
- Founding Year: 2020
- Employee Range: 11-50
- Location: Taiwan
- Signal Strength: Very strong
- What they do: Frontier.cool leverages AI to enhance fabric sourcing efficiency. The 3D fabric sourcing platform empowers brands and designers to fuel their creativity, ideation, and productivity, by accelerating their digital product creation workflows. Moreover, it facilitates visualizing digital fabrics on various 3D models to expedite decision-making. This cloud-based platform assists in managing, organizing, and categorizing all digital fabrics for easy sharing with internal or external teams, enabling more efficient responses to customer trends.
10. Ambaram
- Founding Year: 2021
- Employee Range: 11-50
- Location: USA
- Signal Strength: Strong
- What they do: Ambarabam develops a fashion platform that enables designers to collaborate with internal and external teams, facilitating communication and decision-making. Designers view projects, assignments, and schedules on a single dashboard. The PLM software is designed for the apparel industry to manage and track all data and processes throughout a product design lifecycle.
Tips to Quickly Find New Apparel Companies
Utilizing a SaaS platform like the Discovery Platform for identifying new apparel companies provides significant benefits compared to traditional scouting methods:
- Streamlined Efficiency/Increased Efficiency: The Discovery Platform offers advanced tools that streamline the scouting process. It replaces your hours of conventional desk research, saving time and resources in identifying apparel innovations.
- Access to Real-time Insights: Gain a competitive edge with up-to-date information on the latest trends in the apparel industry. The platform keeps you informed with near real-time updates on emerging apparel companies and news, enabling you to make swift and informed decisions.
- Tailored Exploration/Precise Scouting: Customize your search to focus on specific niches within the apparel sector, such as sustainable clothing, immersive fashion, or smart fabrics. The platform’s diverse filtering options allow you to target your scouting efforts precisely, ensuring that you find the most relevant and groundbreaking companies in the field.
Ready to Explore All Apparel Companies?
This overview highlights just a few new apparel companies of all 19K+ currently covered by the Discovery Platform. To explore them all, book a personalized demo or download one of our free Industry Innovation Reports for a quick overview.
