The North Face’s former CEO just bet his reputation on this tiny startup

Over the last decade, as consumers became more aware of climate change, the fashion industry suddenly scrambled to curb its enormous environmental footprint.

Everyone from Prada to H&M launched products made of recycled nylon and organic cotton. Gucci, Patagonia, and Timberland invested in regenerative agriculture. Adidas and Nike began designing fully recyclable sneakers. Resale programs popped up everywhere.

According to many industry insiders, this moment has now passed. Politics and culture are no longer focused on the climate crisis. Consumers, faced with the higher price of sustainable products, consistently choose their wallets over their values. In response, many brands have quietly abandoned their sustainability goals.

Arne Arens watched all of this from the inside. As CEO of The North Face and later Boardriders, the parent company of Quiksilver and Billabong, he lived through fashion’s sustainability push—and its retreat. But he hasn’t lost faith in the industry’s ability to clean up its act.

Now he’s betting the next chapter of his career on a Bay Area startup called Unspun, which has developed proprietary 3D weaving technology capable of producing pants with significantly fewer carbon emissions, reduced waste, and shorter lead times. Unspun, which has more than $50 million in VC funding, has named Arens as its new CEO. The hire is a signal that a well-known industry leader believes the technology is ready to move from proof-of-concept to scale.

The Enthusiasm That Faded

Ask Arens about fashion’s sustainability retreat and he doesn’t hesitate. He confirms what anyone who covered the industry closely already sensed: There was real pressure, real investment, and then a gradual letting-go.

“Part of that is that people have never really been able to figure out how to do sustainability cost-competitively,” he says. “Season after season we tried to move to 100% recycled nylon and polyester and cotton. But when we looked at the margin breakdown, we realized we’d have to price everything up by $5 to $10, and unfortunately consumers are just not ready to pay for that.”

More broadly, the politics of sustainability shifted. In the U.S., we went from a president who installed a climate czar to one who has staffed his cabinet with climate deniers. Much like DEI, the cultural forces that made sustainability a corporate imperative changed, and brands no longer felt pressure to signal their green credentials.

But taking a step back, Arens has come to the conclusion that making an ethical argument to consumers was never going to be a successful business strategy. Ethical brands needed to find a way to make sustainable products affordable—ideally, even cheaper than traditional products.

That’s when he came across Unspun, which promises fashion brands cost savings while also slashing their environmental impact. “The financial rationale for adopting Unspun technology is even stronger than the decarbonization one,” he says. “You’re getting the zero waste piece for free.”

The Machine That Changed the Math

Kevin Martin cofounded Unspun a decade ago on a simple insight: The fashion industry’s biggest sustainability problem isn’t the materials. It’s the mismatch between what gets made and what actually sells. His vision was to build technology that would help the industry’s largest players operate with significantly less waste—and make the economics work while doing it.

The fashion industry’s current model forces brands to place orders with factories nine to twelve months out. That planning horizon generates staggering inefficiencies. A brand might forecast that soft pink will be in style next spring and place large orders for dresses and shirts in that hue. If their prediction is wrong—as it often is in our current fast-moving fashion cycle—much of their inventory will not sell.

Martin estimates forecast error typically runs between five and 20%—meaning a meaningful fraction of every season’s production will end up discounted, donated, or destroyed. “All of the money and time and energy spent to make something, move it around, not sell it, and then destroy it,” he says, is “the biggest slice of waste.”

Unspun’s answer is a 3D weaving machine it calls Vega. The machine controls thousands of individual yarns simultaneously, producing a complete pant leg in a single automated process with minimal human finishing required. Every part of the system cuts cost. Labor costs are slashed. There is near zero fabric waste. And perhaps most importantly, companies can respond to real-time demand, rather than year-old forecasts.

The technology currently produces woven trousers—everyday casual, workwear, chinos, and soon denim—with plans to expand. Trousers make sense as a starting product. The tube shape of the leg maps well to the weaving process. It is also a relatively simple design that can be replicated across different waist and inseam sizes, and colors.

Passing the Mr. Burns Test

Martin has a framework he uses when thinking about sustainability impact at scale. He calls it the Mr. Burns test—a reference to The Simpsons’ greedy nuclear plant owner. “If you want to have a big sustainability impact, you have to sell to Mr. Burns,” he says. The overlap between profitability and sustainability, he argues, “is where all of us with a mission of sustainability regardless of industry need to be focused.”

Unspun’s pitch to brand partners leans on this logic. Arens, drawing on two decades watching brands manage inventory from the inside, describes the proposition in stark financial terms. The ability to reduce lead times by two-thirds or more means dramatically less capital tied up in future inventory, dramatically less waste at season’s end, and dramatically better margins overall.

“There are gains from a working capital perspective because you don’t have to commit dollars to inventory that far out,” Arens says. “Then, you’re cutting out the wasted inventory that invariably results from ordering a year out. Instead, you’re getting full margin on every item you make. The overall financial impact is absolutely massive.”

From Microfactory to Scale

Unspun currently operates a small factory (or “micro-factory” in its parlance) in Emeryville, California, where it runs machines continuously and hosts brands for sampling and proof-of-concept runs. Walmart and Decathlon are among its confirmed customers, among others that can’t yet be named. The momentum is building quickly. Martin says that new customers are visiting weekly. Now, what is holding Unspun back is capacity.

Unspun is now searching for a U.S. manufacturing facility, pursuing what Martin describes as a “consortium approach”—getting brands and factories to commit together to a facility that will be capable of serving many customers. In Europe, where apparel manufacturing infrastructure still exists in countries like Portugal and Turkey, the company is pursuing a faster path by selling machines directly into existing factories.

This expansion is fueled by $50 million in venture capital, but future funding is expected to incorporate public-private partnerships. Martin points to New Mexico—which offers incentives to attract manufacturing—as an example of capital that could underwrite factory buildouts. “It’s not really a left or right issue,” he says. “The common interest is making things in America.”

Why This Hire Matters

In a moment when much of the fashion industry has gone quiet on sustainability, Arens is betting loud in the opposite direction—leaving a career arc of large, profitable brands for a startup still building out its first real factory.

He’s candid about what he’s walking into. “It’s a very different size of company that I’m used to working at,” Arens acknowledges. But he’s equally convinced of Unspun’s central premise—that a technology simultaneously solving for speed, waste, and financial efficiency represents something significant.

The fact that someone with that perspective is now the one making the pitch—to the very peers he left behind—may be the clearest signal yet that sustainability in fashion isn’t dead. It’s just finally learning to speak the only language that’s ever really moved the industry: the language of money.