We've heard from the manufacturers. Now it's the technologists' turn. This is Fashion Forward's Industry Roundtable, where host Christabel Achu sits down with the people actually building, sourcing, and shaping fashion, and asks them the questions everyone else is too polite to ask.
Malini Kannan is the Co-Founder and CEO of Nūl, an agentic AI platform helping fashion brands make better inventory decisions and reduce overproduction. She entered fashion through a climate-tech accelerator, spent months shadowing leaders across the value chain, and built a company around one belief, overproduction is solvable, because it's a business decision with real, achievable levers.
In this episode, we get into the real math behind fashion's waste problem, why a single cotton t-shirt carries six kilograms of embedded carbon, why the industry produces roughly 150 billion garments a year with 30% never sold, and why most brands have quietly resolved the tradeoff between cost and quantity by just defaulting to the cheapest, highest-MOQ option, without ever really deciding anything at all.
If you're building a fashion brand, building fashion tech, or trying to understand where AI actually helps versus where it's just noise, this conversation will change how you think about your next forecast.
(0:00) The Scale of Fashion Waste
(2:08) Understanding the Fashion Supply Chain
(2:24) Introduction and Context of Waste in Fashion
(6:40) The Role of Technology in Overproduction
(10:59) Disconnect Between Technology and Fashion Operations
(15:08) Data Challenges and AI in Fashion
(19:03) Addressing Overproduction and Supply Chain Solutions
(21:37) The Gap for SMEs and Indie Brands
(23:04) Navigating the Tech Landscape for SMEs
(25:26) Bridging the Communication Gap in Fashion
(27:59) The Need for Unified Data Platforms
(30:45) Agility and Digital-First Production Models
(34:17) The Role of Data in Demand Forecasting
(36:42) Cross-Collaboration in the Fashion Supply Chain
(39:15) The Reality of AI in Fashion Technology
(40:05) Understanding Overproduction vs. Overconsumption
Fashion technology, agentic AI, overproduction vs overconsumption, demand forecasting, fashion supply chain, fashion data, MOQs explained, digital first production, fashion sustainability.
Read the full interactive conversation on Substack, and
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