Unspun’s Beth Esponette Unlocks the Science-Driven Side of Fashion
This article was previously published in Rivet magazine.
For Beth Esponette, a career in denim was never a given.
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Raised in Maine, the Unspun co-founder and chief product officer could have been easily followed a more conventional path. “I grew up with probably more trees than people around me,” she said. Apparel design wasn’t topical to her daily life, and yet she was fascinated by both the art and the science behind creating textiles and clothing.
“I grew up at the intersection of white-collar work and people just rolling up their sleeves and getting things done,” Esponette said. Being surrounded by a family of truck drivers as well as academics taught her the merits of both honest labor and strategic thinking. “I think that led to me wanting to study clothing when I was really young.”
Her parents weren’t happy with her goals—being a designer seemed like a frivolous pursuit to them, Esponette said. Nonetheless, her passion persisted throughout high school and she went on to study both fiber science and apparel design at Cornell University in upstate New York.
“It was a mix of polymer science and chemistry classes, anthropology, psychology, art and design, and business,” she explained. “It was so cool to look at one industry through all those different lenses.” Esponette relished digging into the functionality of fabrics while examining their place in society. But she was frustrated by the lack of insight into the manufacturing operations that bring products to life. “In the U.S., we’re so removed from what goes into the making of our clothing,” she said.
That changed once she entered the industry, working for Japanese cycling gear brand Pearl Izumi as a product developer and moving on to Bay Area-based Mountain Hardwear as a material researcher. But what she learned only reinforced her view that the linear take-make-waste fashion model, which relies primarily on cheap overseas labor, is broken. “I wasn’t so jaded that I wanted to leave the industry, because it has so much potential and I know that everyone in the industry wants to do the right thing,” she said.
Esponette believed that technological advancement could help the sector break its toxic cycle of overproduction and overreliance on low-cost offshore manufacturing. While “everyone was walking around with an iPhone in their pocket,” the fashion sector was still using equipment invented in the early 19th century. “Even though sewing machines are amazing, they require that the industry remain extremely manual,” she said.
A lack of automation, and a consumer expectation that clothes remain cheap, was keeping low-wage-earning laborers tied to these machines, churning out millions of garments each year, she thought. “It was around that time in 2013 that I started to think about how we might make products on demand, and think about manufacturing differently,” she added. “The gears started turning in my head.”
Esponette was accepted to Stanford University’s joint Design Master’s Program between the school’s Art and Mechanical Engineering departments. Focused on manufacturing and design, the curriculum helped her examine the supply chain processes of industries outside of fashion, and mine them for solutions to the apparel sector’s biggest challenges. During her studies, 3D printing became a craze, with innovators predicting that the construction of physical models from CAD or digital renderings had the potential to change the way everything—from consumer products to medical devices—was made. “That was a big inspiration,” Esponette said, and it prompted her to examine how the concept might apply to fashion. “That led to a lot of experimentation with plastics and other materials, but eventually it came back to yarn,” she said. The foundations for Unspun were born, with Esponette believing that a new venture—3D weaving—could revolutionize the apparel industry.
Weeks after graduating, she took to the web to search for a co-founder who could match her expertise in product and design with business acumen. After posting on a job board, she found Walden Lam, another Stanford graduate who would become the company’s co-founder and CEO. One year later, co-founder and chief technology officer Kevin Martin joined the ranks, bringing with him an expertise in engineering and robotics that would prove essential to designing Unspun’s 3D weaving machinery.
“We were making some embarrassing, yet promising, prototypes,” Esponette said of the early days. But the team knew that building the hardware would take time—years, in fact. So they decided to build out the other half of the business, which would take Unspun from a machinery company to a full-fledged on-demand manufacturer.
“We were pretty sure that from a business standpoint, with these huge pain points like inventory management and overproduction, brands would eventually want to get to a place where they exactly meet supply and demand,” Esponette said. But why would consumers care about the idea of making apparel to order? “We did like a lot of market research, and we had hypotheses around customized fit and customized design,” she added. “That’s a really unique value proposition.”
A consumer focus group solidified the group’s focus on denim. In surveying 400 men and women about the types of products that presented the most fit issues, 300 pointed to jeans. “It’s such a ubiquitous product—everyone has jeans, and if they don’t, they wish they had jeans,” she said. “It was a no-brainer for us.”
While it has taken five years for Unspun to commercialize its 3D weaving technology, now known as Vega, the software that allows the company to automate the process of building made-to-fit, on-demand jeans was built in just four months. The group developed a consumer-friendly fit-finding process involving a questionnaire and proprietary, app-based body-scanning technology. Using learnings from Stanford about mechanical engineering and 3D modeling, Unspun’s technology digitally drapes the denim to fit an exact model of the shopper.
2024 is proving to be a pivotal year for the company. “We’re now finally starting to connect those two pieces [of the business], where you can get a custom fit, and send it to our 3D weaving machines to have it made,” Esponette said. The past few years have seen the company launch capsule collections with brands like H&M’s Weekday, Pangaia, Collina Strada and Eckhaus Latta.
Last month Unspun announced a $32 million Series B funding round led by DCVC, with participation from Lowercarbon Capital, E12, Decathlon and SOSV, that will support the scaling of Vega technology in Europe.
“The next five years will really be about setting up more of these micro-factories, to get the supply as close to demand as possible and try to localize production,” Esponette said. While global expansion is a goal, the co-founder is bullish about the return of U.S. manufacturing and aims to see Unspun open a larger facility to serve American brands. “It will hopefully be very impactful because we don’t have production in the U.S. anymore, at scale,” she said. “I’m very curious to see how that goes.”
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