Our Stories
Reframing Textile Surplus to Transform Australian Fashion Design
For fashion labels, many of them small and medium sized operators, there is a systemic barrier when it comes to buying fabric: minimum ordering quantities are well beyond their actual requirements.
At the same time, many hundreds of metres of surplus material sit unused in warehouses around Australia. Circular Sourcing is a platform that brings the two sides together in an innovative approach to the issue of textile surplus.
Drawing on her experience as head of independent fashion label A.BCH, Courtney Holm established circular design firm A.BCH World, which incubated and launched Circular Sourcing, a platform to address this problem head-on. Courtney explains that her brand regularly accumulated materials surplus to requirements due to systemic reasons such as minimum ordering quantities. While many brands, factories and mills experience issues with excess stock, for A.BCH the problem was intensified as the small label attempted pioneering practices in the use of novel materials in efforts to improve circularity.
While running the A.BCH brand, we would seek out the most innovative suppliers from around the world and ask them to produce cutting edge products, where we’d often be the first to test them out,” says Courtney.
Trims that weren’t yet being produced at scale come to mind. To incentivise factories to produce them, we had to commit to large volumes. What that meant in practice was that we were often left with surplus materials that were still high quality and perfectly usable, but excess to our needs.
Reasoning that other smaller brands would be interested in accessing these materials if barriers of cost or minimum quantities were eliminated, Courtney set up Circular Sourcing, initially an online store to sell the surplus trims and fabrics from A.BCH. Although the website began as an experiment, the A.BCH team quickly realised that there was significant demand for these materials. At the same time, across Australia there were warehouses filled with surplus fabrics that suppliers were struggling to shift—and that frequently ended up in landfill. To Courtney, making these surplus materials accessible to brands via a shared platform was the obvious solution, and with the help of a Sustainability Victoria grant and industry partners that included MTK Australia, Full Circle Fibres and The Social Studio, A.BCH began building out the Circular Sourcing platform.
We identified over 10 million kilograms of unused textiles sitting in Australian warehouses. We knew we had something here. So we built a minimum viable product to test whether a two-sided surplus marketplace could work at scale.
Recognising that Circular Sourcing could have a systems-wide impact across the entire fashion and textiles industry, Courtney and her team decided to move away from running A.BCH as a fashion brand to focus on building up the platform.
A.BCH transitioned away from making new clothes for one brand, and into an incubator and consultancy for circular design (now A.BCH World). We started shaping up the future of Circular Sourcing, with further support from the RMIT Venture Hub, early investors, and funding sources including the Country Road Climate Fund. This support has enabled us to scale significantly.
The Climate Fund grant supported two core initiatives developed in collaboration with RMIT University: the Guide to Surplus and the Surplus Impact Calculator.
Designed for businesses on both sides of the surplus material issue—whether fabric suppliers or designers using existing fabrics to create new items—the Guide to Surplus is an open-source toolkit available via the Circular Sourcing website. It shares resources and knowledge to equip design teams to begin sourcing and using surplus materials to create new products, and addresses both challenges and opportunities.
The aim was to give businesses the confidence and tools to succeed when working with surplus materials and to unlock access to materials they may not have been able to use previously due to price, volume, or location constraints.
Shot on Wurundjeri Woi-wurrung Country
Published in September 2025, the Guide to Surplus has been downloaded in more than 29 countries, with word about the useful resource and the Circular Sourcing platform spreading to designers, manufacturers and the broader industry worldwide.
Courtney says the Climate Fund grant was crucial in creating the guide.
The grant gave us the time and resourcing to work on this project separately from our everyday operations and to step out of constant delivery mode and think ahead towards the bigger picture. That meant we could put proper thought and care into the Guide to Surplus, including the creative output. The imagery, the design, the way the guide looks and feels, that was a big part of the project for us. We wanted it to be a document that designers would actually want to open, read and keep.
Having the time and support to do it well, rather than rushing it or cutting corners, made a real difference, and it’s something we’re incredibly grateful for.
Alongside the guide, Circular Sourcing developed the Impact Calculator, which is housed on the website for immediate use when ordering fabric. Customers browsing available fabrics enter the number of metres they are considering purchasing. The calculator then displays environmental impact data, including embodied carbon, litres of water used and the number of kilograms of waste diverted, allowing buyers to see at a glance how choosing existing materials rather than producing new ones can create meaningful change. When material is purchased, a transaction certificate is issued, providing a verified step in the sourcing journey for buyers.
By making these impacts visible at the point of sourcing, businesses can make more informed decisions earlier in the design process and ensure they’re getting the maximum value from materials that already exist. It encourages impact-led decision-making rather than treating sustainability as an afterthought.
For some brands, the calculator becomes an accessible entry point into sustainability—especially for those who are interested in surplus but haven’t previously connected sourcing decisions to climate impact. In one example, a brand purchasing through the platform avoided over 3.5 tonnes of CO2e compared to sourcing the same fabric new.
As the need and demand for responsible sourcing and production in the fashion industry grows, Courtney is excited about Circular Sourcing’s potential to create positive change. Having already diverted more than 30 tonnes of textiles away from landfill since commencing operations, and aiming at diverting a further 238 tonnes of textiles in the next two years, Circular Sourcing is well on the way to creating significant impact—both at home and across the global industry, where an estimated 26 million tonnes of surplus fabric is generated every year.
Several educational institutions actively promote Circular Sourcing to students as a practical sourcing resource and we are now exploring new official partnerships with education bodies where we can supply surplus and recycled materials to their programs and students.
We’re also seeing growing international interest, particularly from Australian brands manufacturing offshore and overseas buyers who want access to verified surplus materials.
Courtney says her hope for Circular Sourcing—and for circularity in fashion more broadly—is that every roll of quality surplus material is mobilised and reused by businesses with the creative vision to embrace and work with materials that already exist. She sees surplus fabrics as a starting point to addressing the larger issue of circularity, ultimately “setting guidelines, incentives, and rewards that encourage businesses to design and produce better, more circular materials from the outset”.
For us, the big picture is about facilitating and powering sustainable material trade—and using the act of trade itself as a lever for change. By embedding better data, better incentives, and better decision-making into how materials are bought and sold, we can start to influence what those materials are in the first place.
Ultimately, it’s about upstream transformation. Better inputs lead to better outcomes across the entire lifecycle of a material or product, and that’s where circularity becomes real.
We fund grassroots projects that mitigate climate change and build climate resilience across four key pillars.
