At Sourcing Journal’s Visions of Tomorrow event on Monday, Beth Esponnette, co-founder and chief product officer at Unspun, referenced a widely shared cartoon of two cavemen struggling to haul a rock-filled cart with square wheels while a third holds up round ones. “No thanks,” one says. “Too busy,” says another.

“That’s what it feels like to be working in the fashion industry today,” said Esponnette, the 2026 visionary in supply chain. “We’re stuck in this system that doesn’t quite work, and we’ve got these square wheels that we’re dragging along.”

She said that while it would make the most sense for everyone to stop their carts and make the switch, the industry does not quite work that way. “Is there a way, then, to try some round wheels in the meantime, perhaps as a pilot? How can we get more test runs going?”

“Because the innovators that are out there are really willing,” Esponnette said. “They’re willing to put their money into it. They’re willing to take away the costs that you have to incur. So how can we make it as easy as possible?”

It’s a mindset shift that Unspun, a decade-old startup that uses proprietary 3D weaving technology to produce clothing on demand, has been pushing for. At the same time, the principles behind the company’s model are hardly new: nature doesn’t overproduce, and it doesn’t leave behind waste.

“Looking at the manufacturing methods of nature, they’re very much based on growth and decay,” Esponnette said. “They’re about making things when you need them, where you need them, in response to signals or needs from the world. There’s a lot to be learned there. It’s very hard to replicate, but it’s worth chasing.”

Carmen Gama, director of circular design at Eileen Fisher and the 2026 visionary in intelligent design, knows all about square wheels. When the pioneering slow-fashion brand launched its clothing take-back program in 2009, every return was tracked in Excel.

Implementing a warehouse management system through its recommerce partner, Trove, changed everything.

“Before, we were tracking incoming inventory across several touchpoints, but human error meant data wasn’t always 100 percent accurate,” Gama said. “We couldn’t track down to the garment type or fiber because that was extremely complicated for a certification team to do manually. With Trove’s WMS, every garment arriving at our warehouse is instantly tagged by category, material and size, and we can divert it to its highest value.”

Today, the company receives 28,000 post-consumer garments every month. In March, Eileen Fisher hit a milestone of 3 million garments reclaimed since launching its Renew initiative 17 years ago.

Spoke, meet round wheel.

Unspun also knew that sticking with a manual, analog approach would be too time-consuming and expensive to respond quickly to style trends or other real-time demand. To overcome those challenges, it uses software that plugs into CLO and other 3D fashion design programs to make garment-structure adjustments dynamically during the weaving process, mimicking nature’s rhythms of growth and decay.

“But we’ve also learned that while you can have pie-in-the-sky ideas, sometimes you have to reel it back to where the industry is today,” Esponnette said. “Initially, we looked at materials that weren’t even yarn, and we built around a fully on-demand model. But the world isn’t quite ready for pure on-demand apparel yet. So we adapted: we use real yarn, and we focus heavily on responsive replenishment models. Dream big, but meet the industry where it actually is.”

Trust—something evidently missing among the cavepeople working in transportation—is part of it, too. For both Unspun and Eileen Fisher, that trust comes from the bottom up, meaning consumers.

Our business model is to sell our machines to factories, but coming right into the industry and saying, ‘Buy these machines that you’ve never heard of for a process you’ve never seen,’ was too much,” Esponnette said. “So we took a couple of steps back and said, ‘Hold on. Who do manufacturers serve? They serve brands.’ But then we realized brands weren’t ready either. Who do they serve? Consumers.”

Unspun started with consumers, creating D2C products to build trust before moving up to brands that could persuade suppliers to buy in. Now it’s ready to start deploying machines to manufacturers overseas. She still laughs in disbelief that the company was able to convince people to walk into a truck to get body-scanned, back when it was making custom-fit products.

For Eileen Fisher, the same logic applies: its circular supply chain relies on customers trusting the brand enough to return their used clothing.

“We would not be here without them,” Gama said.

There’s something to be said for refusing to budge from your core principles of timeless design, high-quality materials and a focus on natural fibers for four decades.

“We get garments that are 40 years old, and they’re still so relevant; the quality of the materials is still very durable,” she said. “Sometimes, of course, we have garments that we’re not able to find a solution for that we’d like—because while every garment that comes back to our doors has a solution, downcycling is our least favorite. So we’re always thinking: how do we get garments out of our downcycling category? But basically, our values are inherited through circularity and regenerative design.”

Esponnette doesn’t believe everything has to be on demand, just like she doesn’t believe every square wheel needs replacing.

“We don’t have problems with evergreen products that people always need,” she said. “There are similarities between food and clothing—especially when you think about how organic started in food and is hopefully trickling down into our industry. But I see it the same way with on-demand: there are some things you want readily available, basic and always the same. The higher-value product, the one that’s more differentiated or made for your needs, can be on demand.”