The legacy apparel retail model is broken, and you are - quite literally - paying the price, with only 20-40% of your money being spent on the actual product:

Estimated Breakdown of £100 Spent on a Traditional Retail Product

A fundamental issue is that brands continually overproduce, resulting in huge amounts of waste and substandard products.

• An estimated 150 billion new items of clothing are produced every single year
• Between 15 and 45 billion of those items never get sold
• 73% of waste clothing goes to landfill and only 1% gets recycled into new clothing
• Roughly a truckload of perfectly good but unsold 'overstocked' apparel gets destroyed EVERY SECOND

What this means for you is substandard products, because that waste has to be factored in to the manufacturing cost and retail price of each item. Every penny wasted is a penny that could have been spent on better materials and manufacturing, more innovation, increased sustainability, and a lower price.

Kostüme fixes this using a direct-to-customer (DTC) pre-order batch model, meaning that only items already sold ever get made. This simple change removes all the guesswork, stops waste before it starts, and means we can spend much more on both product development and final specification without increasing prices. In fact, in many cases our products are less expensive than similar products despite frequently scoring higher in both press and customer reviews.

The Kostüme way means:

1. No guesswork. No overstocking. No discounting.

The legacy model forces brands to not only guess demand for each new product release, but also to physically manufacture, distribute and market them well ahead of knowing the real level of customer demand. The harsh reality of this model is that an appalling amount of clothing gets destroyed each year without ever finding a buyer.

Every brand factors this (and the margin-damaging discounting that goes hand in hand with overproduction) into their plans.

2. Better products.

Our pre-order model translates directly to better products. Clear, simple, measurable.

Ask yourself is it luck that a small new independent brand can enter a fiercely technical and competitive sector and instantly set a new benchmark with a 10/10-rated bib short that Road.cc described as being 'the nicest thing I've ever put next to my skin'? This level of quality, performance and sustainability is only possible at this price point because of our pre-order model.

With the wasteful legacy model used by most brands, you are simply never buying the 'best' version that a product could be, because significant compromises are having to be made along the way. This might mean less ethical or technically proficient factories. Cheaper, more polluting fabrics. Copycat products with no investment in innovation. Excessive product flaws and failures.

Our pre-approach means that we don't have to guess how many products to make, and in which size/sex configuration. And with no overstock, we never have to discount or landfill unsold goods. The result is that we can take more risks with product innovation, spend more time testing and refining, more budget for incredible fabrics and trims, and partner with the best manufacturing partners.

3. Competitive prices.

Best of all, we can do this without charging more for our products.

Price is always a challenging conversation, because what is expensive for one person is affordable for another. Kostüme exists to make the best version of a product that it can possibly be. Could we have made our award-winning cycling shorts 20% less expensive? Of course. But they would be an 8/10 product instead of 10/10, and what would be the point of that? We'd be just another apparel brand - something the world does not really need.

If you compare our prices directly against leading legacy brands in the same category, in many cases ours are substantially less expensive despite offering what we believe is class-leading features, fabrics and sustainability. And most importantly, this is backed up by our extensive independent customer reviews.

Ask yourself this: Isn't it better to know that more of your money is being utilised to make the product better, rather than simply wasted?

4. More sustainable.

Note the word 'more'. If you see an apparel brand labelling themselves or their products as 'sustainable' then ask them to prove it. They won't, because they can't. Truly sustainable apparel doesn't exist yet, it's greenwash. However, we can at least demonstrate that our model and products are more sustainable thanks to our holistic approach. You can read more about this here.