MANUFACTURED

a podcast about sustainability and the making of fashion

Discover the podcast (2'23)

We’ve been lucky to have front row seats to the fashion supply chain, and we want to bring this insider perspective to you. Join us in our quest to illuminate the fashion supply chain and change the industry we love for the better.

Jessie Li & Kim van der Weerd

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Recent episodes

87. How it’s Made: On Wool with Marianne Mclean-Atkins

16 May 2023

On this episode, we’re taking a deep dive into wool production with Marianne Mclean-Atkins, a textile designer and knitwear specialist with 20 years of experience working as an in-house designer for Asia-based apparel suppliers, doing everything from concept to execution. She is currently Sustainable Fashion Education Director at Redress in Hong Kong. We go through the various stages of the production of wool, starting from the rearing and shearing of the sheep, to the classing of the fleece, degreasing, scouring, spinning, dyeing, blending, and finally the knitting or weaving of the yarn. We also touch on why wool fell out of favour, and what the future looks like for it.

86. How it’s made: On Virgin & Recycled Polyester with Sharon Chen

02 May 2023

On this week’s episode, we discuss the production process of a pretty infamous material – polyester, or polyethylene terephthalate (PET) and recycled PET, to be precise. Kim is joined by Sharon Chen, the Director Of Business Development at Baichuan Resources Recycling, a leading manufacturer of recycled textiles in China, who speaks about how virgin and recycled PET are manufactured. Sharon tells us about the types of raw materials needed in the process, who they buy these inputs from, and how they’re processed to ultimately become a yarn. She takes us through the spinning, weaving, and dyeing processes and shares a bit about who their customers are. They also talk about why traceability is so important to the company, and how they approach this.

85. Everyday Essentialism: On Differentiating “Brands” from “Suppliers”

13 Dec 2022

We all know that there’s a kind of essentialism that happens in conversations about sustainable fashion (and beyond). It’s shorthand that artificially groups together very diverse groups of people and lumps them according to a single or several defining features. This episode is an open discussion of two such terms: “brand” and “supplier.”

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Our first live event with Transformers Foundation!

When: April 13th at 11am EST / 5pm CET / 6pm Istanbul / 8pm PKT / 8:30pm IST
Duration: One hour
Vertical Integration & The Sustainable Fashion Agenda
As supply chains came to a screeching halt last year, consolidation and vertical integration became the latest buzzwords. But, these ambiguous terms can mean many different things. How and why do suppliers at various tiers decide which parts of the production process they’re going to do? And how does this shape approaches to sustainability?

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About us

Co-founder Jessie Li – Working for diverse parties across the fashion supply chain in both China and Cambodia has shaped Jessie’s conviction that supply chain relationships are complex, and the people within them often misunderstood. She’s a thinker, and reflects deeply about why people behave the way that they do. You can also talk to her about environmental conservation, long distance hiking and her cats.

Jessie Li

Kim van der Weerd

Co-founder & host Kim van der Weerd – Kim moved to Cambodia armed with a background in human rights and a desire to better understand the fashion supply chain. Managing production facilities challenged all of her assumptions about what sustainable fashion requires, made her a firm advocate of equal partnership, and instilled a deep respect for the exhausting and difficult work of making clothes. She too, likes to talk about cats.