UK fashion faces a resilience test as tech pivots from sustainability to supply‑chain security

According to the original report of a recent Texintel industry debate, the UK and wider global textile sector is confronting a moment of strategic reckoning: regulatory pressure, climate risk and geopolitical uncertainty are prompting brands and manufacturers to ask whether technological innovation can do more than reduce footprints — can it also rebuild resilience? The discussion made clear that the answers will not come from isolated innovations but from coordinated change across design, supply chains and on‑the‑ground manufacturing capacity.

At the heart of that coordination, industry actors point to the Circular Fashion Innovation Network as a model for convening effort. Lauren Junestrand of the UK Fashion & Textile Association described how the network has mapped transformation opportunities across UK supply chains and identified priority interventions. "Everyone is operating so much in isolation," she observed at the Texintel debate, arguing that a convening role — bringing brands, innovators, academia and supply‑chain partners together — is essential if reshoring, upskilling and circular business models are to gain traction rather than remain pilots.

One of the practical battlegrounds for circularity is recycling infrastructure. The Texintel panel and parallel industry projects have placed automated sorting and preprocessing at the centre of scaling ambitions: improved feedstock quality is critical to making mechanical and chemical recycling viable at scale. The H&M Foundation’s AI‑powered smart sorting project, for example, describes using visual and hyperspectral analysis to classify post‑consumer garments and improve routing to appropriate recycling processes — a demonstration of the kinds of sensing and automation that proponents say could unblock current bottlenecks.

Digital tools are also reframing production planning and the relationship between brands and factories. Shruti Grover recounted how a major brand’s move to just‑in‑time buying simply multiplied existing workloads: "If a brand is going from buying four times a year to 50 times a year with the same team, you're 8x or 10x‑ing your work," she told the panel. Technology vendors such as Manny AI position their platforms as a response to that challenge: the company says its image‑recognition modules can auto‑generate bills of materials, estimate standard minute values and enable live capacity booking so brands and factories can collaborate on planning rather than operate in silos.

Those vendor claims carry operational implications that industry leaders are eager to quantify — and to temper. At the debate Grover reported that AI‑led process improvements had delivered EBITDA uplifts of 6–8% for one brand through reduced overstock and higher full‑price sell‑through. While such figures underline the financial case for investment, it is important to note that the specific productivity and margin benefits cited come from company reporting and pilot results rather than an industry‑wide, standardised dataset; independent validation and broader trials will be needed to understand applicability across different product categories and factory contexts.

Beyond software, manufacturers are rethinking where and how production happens. Joey Pringle described a multi‑jurisdictional approach that mixes locations in China, Brazil, Colombia and the UK to match material availability with manufacturing capability and demand. "There's nothing worse than hearing, 'Hey, we want to work with you, but we can't do it in China,'" Pringle told the Texintel audience, explaining why geographic diversification can reduce lead times, cut embodied emissions and allow brands to scale next‑generation materials more effectively. Profiles of Veshin Factory and similar multi‑site operators underline that transitioning to novel materials — cactus leathers, mycelium and other alternatives — requires not just intent but specialist testing, transparency and supply‑chain partnerships.

That collaborative impulse is visible in dedicated innovation ecosystems. The Berlin Fashion Hub’s pixel‑to‑product microfactory, developed with partners including machine makers and digital‑production platforms, is an example: by combining digital knitting, production software and cooperative governance the Hub is testing on‑demand workflows that can compress design‑to‑product timelines and colocate manufacture closer to consumption. As the Hub’s leaders argued, fragmentation — many competing transparency and production platforms — limits interoperability; cooperative frameworks can therefore accelerate pilots into scalable processes.

Crucially, industry discussions repeatedly reframed automation not as a jobs‑killer but as a mechanism for upskilling and resilience, provided policy and investment follow. Events showcasing collaborative robots, agile tooling and factory‑scale automation have emphasised the potential for reshoring higher‑value, low‑volume production while creating different kinds of employment in micro and SME factories. That, speakers suggested, will depend on workforce development, interoperability standards and buy‑in from brands to pay for the additional capability and turnaround time that localised, higher‑skill manufacturing entails.

If there is a roadmap emerging from the debate, it is one that places strategic intelligence and partnership alongside technology. Resilience will come from combining digital tools that improve forecasting and capacity matching, automated sorting and recycling systems that strengthen circular feedstocks, and geographically diversified, values‑driven manufacturing that can work with new materials. Industry bodies, funders and cooperative hubs all have roles to play in convening pilots, standardising interoperability and ensuring that early wins translate into broader competitiveness rather than isolated proof‑points. The companies most likely to prosper, panellists argued, will be those that marry technological sophistication with collaborative business models and a long‑term view of value creation.