From Racks to Data: A Designer’s Quiet Fashion-Tech Pivot

Osmund Taylor Mbanefo is a fashion entrepreneur who  believes that fashion’s next frontier is not just the garments, it’s the data around these garments. With this vision, he created Denim Lab Studios, a startup anchored on the Digital Product Passport (DPP) technology. His interest in fashion technology began with an application to Carbon13 in Cambridge, a venture builder focused squarely on climate change, then morphed into his current journey. Carbon13 was a springboard that helped him unite his passion for climate work and fashion work. 

Digital Product Passport is a readable machine record that trails a piece of cloth from raw material to resale and beyond. Mbanefo combines DPP with Near-Field Communication (NFC) to make fashion pieces traceable, more intelligent and circular. The underlying objective of this fashion revolution is a desire to foster climate change consciousness. Mbanefo understands the weight of unsold stock and untraceable supply chains as well as the adverse effects these have on the environment. He is working to build a fashion industry where every garment is settled in its rightful home, and assumption is replaced by knowledge.

Denim Lab Studios, as the name suggests, is mainly focused on denim garments because of the high waste of resources associated with the fabric. In partnership with Godbless Collective, the studio provides room for denim to be upcycled, tagged with a washable NFC chip and backed by a blockchain ledger so the garment’s trajectory is never forgotten. When the NFC tag is scanned, the garment’s history is revealed, providing details on origin, material makeup, previous repairs and previous owners. The information also updates in real time as the garment moves through stages of resale, recycling and restyling. Mbanefo realises that he cannot save the fashion industry single-handedly, yet he believes that the collaboration of fashion and digital technology is crucial to solving the industry’s problems with sustainability and green consciousness. When the industry is equipped with information on where a garment is coming from, what it is made of and what has happened to it previously, garment lives can become more meaningful.

Denim Lab Studio is not Osmund Mbanefo’s first rodeo in the fashion space. He has worked across fashion retail in Lagos and Paris. In Lagos, he managed a personal brand: Osmund Taylor, which he opines taught him how to make garments. He worked on product-sourcing at Jendaya, London where he came face-to-face with the reality of brand management. Currently, he juggles the curation of the studio with a day job at Asics Europe. These experiences have familiarised Mbanefo with the intricacies of the fashion industry; he knows the rules and now he can reinvent them. Although Denim Lab Studios is still in its pilot stage, it has crossed concept validation,  and had previously secured an incubation seat at Foundry Paris. A foundational reform such as this requires true understanding of the space, and Osmund Taylor Mbanefo is rising to the challenge.