Blockchain is making headway in being recognized as a viable technology global businesses across all industries can use to improve systems and processes and maximize profits. This is due to its capability as a distributed ledger to record data in an immutable and chronological manner on a timestamped server.
Blockchain-powered marketplace “Queen of Raw” has proven that a blockchain marketplace can be created not only to streamline supply chain management, but also to aid in environmental efforts to conserve water, prevent climate change and lessen air and water pollution. Queen of Raw accomplishes all of these by bringing new life to deadstock or unused fabrics and keeping them in circulation.
According to the United Nations, the fashion industry is responsible for almost 20% of global waste water and about 10% of global carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions. The textile industry uses up a total of 26.4 trillion gallons of water yearly, with one T-shirt requiring 700 gallons of water. And 87% of the total fiber input used for garments just goes to waste and is disposed of in incinerators and landfills.
“To have a massive impact, we need access to a marketplace to ensure that everyone—from the top level to the bottom, large (famous) brands and retailers need to be involved. We needed tools and technologies for them to be able to use. The fashion industry is majorly focused on the finished product, so you end up with a lot of leftovers that become waste in addition to problems related to supply chain, technology and data collaboration,”
Stephanie Benedetto, founder of Queen of Raw and former corporate lawyer at Wall Street, said.
By buying, reusing, recycling and selling these deadstock fabrics through its blockchain marketplace, Queen of Raw is able keep track of the fate of each yard of unused fabric, at the same time measuring the gallons of water it conserves, the amount of CO2 emissions it avoids from emitting, the amount of toxic chemicals it prevents from polluting bodies of water and the dollars it saves for every yard sold as opposed to selling newly produced fabrics.
“Blockchain for us is a collaborative immutable database that could just as well be any other technology that interfaces with our APIs and our clients to facilitate the overall collaboration of that immutable data,”
Queen of Raw CTO Phil Dermaso, who has a background in environmental engineering and is exposed to the textile industry through his family, explained.
“It is best only when you can do it in an economically profitable way, and that is a big key of how and why we use blockchain. And this is the reason why we do what we do to make it an economic win for everybody,” Benedetto added.
Established in 2014, Queen of Raw has gone through thick and thin in the course of building its blockchain marketplace, with many top executives resistant to new innovations they cannot understand.
“It is particularly challenging when the brands are being led by a different generation of C suites and the biggest legacy systems. Then you can’t lead with B-word blockchain, T-word technology, or even S-word sustainability, but you can lead with the fact that you are selling invaluable material and putting that money back into digitizing their businesses. If you point out the high costs and liabilities to the CFOs, CMOs and CTOs, they come forward,”
Benedetto revealed.
However, Queen of Raw has surpassed all these challenges and now boasts of 1 billion gallons of water saved and over 400,000 users that include companies in the Fortune 500, luxury brands, independent fashion designers, suppliers and buyers.
