texfash.com: Please give us a brief background on how you started.
Shelly Xu: I grew up in Asia, where I witnessed my childhood playground transform into a textile dump, experiencing firsthand the staggering 92 million tonnes of fabric wasted or burned each year. I founded SXD so that those of us most impacted by this issue can become the solution rather than the victims of the fashion industry.
At SXD, our mission is to bring fabric waste down to zero while maximising beauty within constraints. We reduce carbon emissions by eliminating material waste through the transformation of leftover fabrics and materials into beautiful zero waste designs. This involves effectively addressing waste from both the past (by utilising leftover deadstock materials) and preventing waste in the future (by producing zero waste products without leaving any scraps behind).
Additionally, SXD provides direct support to climate refugees from major manufacturing countries, such as Bangladesh. By hiring seamstresses and offering them wages 2-4 times higher than the local average, we aim to assist them in rebuilding their lives. For one of our climate refugee seamstresses Jhorna, working with us meant that she can now send her children to school instead of having them work at people’s houses as help for extra income. For another climate refugee seamstress Kulsum, it meant that her ailing parents could finally retire.
What was the trigger that led to this award-winning innovation?
Shelly Xu: Combining great design with bleeding-edge technology. Before starting SXD, I was a creative director at one of the largest technology companies. While I loved the intersection of design and technology, I saw that in the fashion industry, technology was often used incrementally—AR filters made clothing look cooler, but I felt that there was an opportunity to apply technology fundamentally, to improve how clothing designs are made from the start.
I also realised that within the fashion industry, design and engineering tend to work in silos. But we know that in order to make zero waste the new standard of fashion, we need great design—because anything that isn't well designed to be loved and worn is just more waste - and great technology—because we need to scale zero waste across the industry to reduce gigatonnes of carbon emissions.
I remember going to the Dean of Engineering at Harvard and asking for the best talents to help SXD automate zero waste designs at scale. We are fortunate to have the technical team he recommended working on SXD today, including industry leaders like Tuanfeng Wang, our founding scientist, who has worked with Adobe Research and pioneered state-of-the-art work in sketch-to-garment construction using deep learning; Takeo Igarashi, our technical expert, who is a professor of Creative Informatics at The University of Tokyo and is known for the development of a sketch-based modelling system (Teddy) and an as-rigid-as-possible image manipulation technique; and James Cheong, our product and software backend lead, who was part of the Disney+ launch team. On the design side, we have award-winning creatives from Prada to Nike.