Allbirds Exits Footwear to Launch AI Infrastructure Business
Allbirds has abandoned the footwear business entirely, announcing that the corporate entity behind the once-hyped sustainable sneaker brand will rebrand as "NewBird AI" and pivot into GPU-as-a-Service cloud computing. The move follows the $39 million sale of the Allbirds brand, intellectual property, and related assets to brand management firm American Exchange Group earlier this month, a deal that was originally expected to lead to the company's dissolution.
Instead, Allbirds raised $50 million in new financing and plans to acquire high-performance GPU assets to offer on-demand AI computing power to enterprises. The Allbirds brand itself will likely continue producing footwear under American Exchange Group's ownership, but the listed company that built the Wool Runner is now positioning itself as an AI infrastructure provider. The numbers tell the story of why: Q3 2025 revenues were $33 million, down 23.3% year-on-year, and the stock has lost roughly 99% of its value since its 2021 IPO.
Camilla Rydzek
Why it matters: This is less a pivot than a corporate shell looking for a reason to exist. Allbirds is not the first struggling company to slap "AI" onto its corporate identity - the playbook echoes the blockchain pivots of 2017–18, when listed companies rebranded overnight to ride a market narrative. The $50 million raise suggests someone believes there is genuine value in the listed vehicle, but NewBird AI enters a GPU-as-a-Service market already crowded with well-capitalised players like CoreWeave, Lambda, and the hyperscalers themselves.
For fashion, the real lesson is starker: Allbirds was the poster child for DTC sustainability-led branding, valued at over $4 billion at its peak. That its corporate remnant now sees more upside in renting compute than in making shoes is a sobering coda for any brand that believed mission alone could sustain a business.
Meghan Markle Invests in OneOff, an AI Platform That Makes Celebrity Style Shoppable
Meghan Markle has taken a stake in OneOff, an AI-powered fashion discovery platform that launched last October with backing from Eva Guerrand-Hermès of the Hermès family and celebrity stylist Jamie Mizrahi. Co-founded by Bobby Maylack, former chief creative officer at Cameo, and Emir Talu of Blank Street, OneOff uses computer vision to analyse paparazzi photos and social media posts of celebrities, automatically identifying what they are wearing and matching those items to shoppable inventory from retailers including Ssense, Net-a-Porter and Revolve.
The platform describes itself as a "visual-first, taste-driven discovery model" where public figures can share outfit details alongside affiliate links. Markle's looks from her current Australia trip - featuring designers including Karen Gee - are already live on the platform, and users can shop her wardrobe in real time. The investment marks a shift from remarks Markle made on Bloomberg's The Circuit in August 2025, when she said she did not know enough about AI to invest in it. She previously used affiliate platform ShopMy in early 2025 before stepping back from it, and holds a minority stake in Rwandan-Italian handbag brand Cesta Collective.
Kristin Contino
Why it matters: The celebrity-to-commerce pipeline is not new - eBay, LTK and ShopMy have all tried versions of it - but OneOff is betting that AI-driven outfit identification, rather than manual tagging by creators, can make the whole process frictionless enough to scale. The model is essentially affiliate commerce dressed in discovery-platform clothing: celebrities attract attention, the algorithm matches products, retailers fulfil orders, and everyone clips a commission. What is less clear is whether that translates into meaningful conversion or just browsing. Marie Claire has already flagged inaccuracies in product identification on Markle's page, which points to the gap between the promise of visual AI and its current reliability.
For fashion brands, the question is whether platforms like OneOff genuinely drive incremental demand or simply add another affiliate layer to sales that would have happened anyway. Markle's involvement will generate attention, that much is guaranteed, but attention and transaction volume are not the same thing.
The Little Loop Raises £750k to Scale Resale Infrastructure for Fashion Brands
Brighton-based resale platform The Little Loop has raised £750,000 from The FSE Group's South East growth fund and FSE's Business Angel Network. The company operates a B2B2C model: consumers trade in used garments in exchange for quality-checked preloved items or vouchers from partner brands, while retailers get a white-label take-back scheme they can embed directly in their own platforms without standing up the operations in-house. The Little Loop currently focuses on children's clothing but plans to use the funding to expand into adult fashion and accelerate its technology development. The UK clothing resale market is valued at roughly £7 billion and accounts for nearly one in four fashion transactions, with forecasts suggesting it will double by 2029. Founder and CEO Charlotte Morley pointed to incoming legislation as a further driver, arguing that resale is no longer optional for brands.
Kirstie Pickering
Why it matters: At £750,000 this is a modest raise, but the model is worth watching. Most brand take-back schemes still feel bolted on - clunky logistics, unclear consumer incentives, minimal integration with the core e-commerce experience. The Little Loop is betting that brands want resale capability without the operational headache, which positions it as infrastructure rather than a consumer marketplace competing with Vinted or Depop.
The move from childrenswear into adult fashion will be the real test: kids' clothing has a natural resale logic (children outgrow things quickly, parents are cost-conscious), whereas adult resale is a far more crowded and brand-sensitive market. If incoming UK textile regulation does tighten, particularly around extended producer responsibility, platforms that already sit inside a brand's own ecosystem will have a structural advantage over standalone marketplaces.
Zero-Waste Pattern Cutting Gains Momentum as Designers Prove It Works at Scale
A growing cohort of designers and small brands are building collections around zero-waste pattern cutting, an approach that rethinks garment construction so that every centimetre of fabric is used, eliminating the roughly 15% of material typically discarded during conventional cutting. The techniques range from jigsaw-style modular pattern layouts and fold-and-drape construction to the systematic reuse of deadstock and micro-scraps.
Pioneers include Timo Rissanen, whose work at Parsons School of Design produced benchmark zero-waste jackets and trousers, and Holly McQuillan's Make/Use project in New Zealand, which pairs open-source zero-waste patterns with modular, repairable garment designs. Cambodian label Tonlé has built an entire vertically integrated business model around it, hand-weaving new textiles from other factories' cutting-room remnants and turning micro-scraps into accessories and paper. In Europe, Dutch designer Pauline van Dongen has integrated zero-waste modular pattern blocks into collections that also incorporate wearable technology. The approach draws on principles long embedded in traditional garments - the kimono, the sari, the kilt - but applies them with contemporary pattern software and materials knowledge.
Eleonora D’Addato
Why it matters: The fashion industry has spent a decade talking about circularity, but most of that conversation focuses on what happens after a garment is made - recycling, resale, take-back schemes. Zero-waste pattern cutting attacks the problem at the design stage, before a single thread is cut, which is where the largest material savings sit. The challenge has always been scalability: intricate pattern work is straightforward for a small atelier producing limited runs, far harder for a brand cutting millions of units on tight margins.
What's notable now is the accumulation of proven methods and open-source tooling that lower the barrier to entry, alongside growing consumer and regulatory pressure on pre-consumer waste. If brands serious about sustainability are not examining their cutting-room yield rates, they are ignoring one of the most direct levers they have.
Zalando Trains 100 Designers to Grade for Every Body Shape
Zalando's fifth Design Academy cohort, co-hosted with VORN - The Berlin Fashion Hub, is dedicating its entire 16-week programme to size, fit, and digital grading. The initiative, which launched in 2022 as a free education programme for emerging designers and young brands, will train up to 100 participants to use CLO's 3D garment design software to visualise how a single pattern scales across a full size range, from XS to 3XL and beyond, on digital avatars representing diverse body types. Rather than producing multiple physical samples, designers apply grading rules digitally, spotting tension zones where fabric might pinch or pull before any cloth is cut. Applications are open from 13 April to 20 May.
The technical core is grading: the process of taking a base-size pattern (typically a medium) and adjusting proportions mathematically so the garment fits real bodies at every point in the range, rather than simply enlarging or shrinking the pattern. By teaching this as a digital-first discipline, Zalando is attempting to shift inclusive sizing from an afterthought - something brands bolt on after designing for a sample size - to a foundational step in the design process itself.
Why it matters: Size and fit remain the single biggest driver of online fashion returns, and returns are one of the industry's most stubborn cost and sustainability problems. Most brands still design for a narrow sample size and grade outward as an industrial afterthought, which is precisely why a dress that looks flawless in a size 38 can fall apart structurally in a size 50.
What makes this programme interesting is less the 3D tooling (CLO is well established) and more the pedagogical bet: that training the next generation of designers to think in terms of body diversity from the first sketch, rather than retrofitting fit later, could begin to erode the structural bias baked into fashion's pattern-making pipeline. Whether 100 designers can shift an industry norm is debatable, but Zalando is at least aiming at the right layer of the problem - the design workflow itself, not just the consumer-facing size chart.