The Fashion Production Disruptor Bundle: Why I Built It and What's Inside

Gina Vincenza Van Epps

Apr 9

3 min read

I want to start with a number:

30 billion.

That is the estimated number of garments produced each year that are never sold.

Burned.

Landfilled.

Shipped to secondhand markets in Ghana and Chile that are collapsing under the volume of what we throw away.

That number is not a tragedy.

It is a design feature.

The conventional fashion production system is built to produce before demand exists. It profits from development and manufacturing whether a garment succeeds or fails.

Forecasting is the engine — brands guess what will sell, commit to production minimums of 500 to 1,000 units per style, and then discount, donate, or destroy what does not move. The system was never built to prevent waste. It was built to make money from production volume, full stop.

I've spent 4 decades working inside of live event productions at the highest levels of the industry. I am an Emmy Award-winning celebrity seamstress for my work on Shakira's Super Bowl LIV Halftime Show costumes. I spent over a decade working on theme park costume builds, fittings, repairs and alterations for Disney, Universal and SeaWorld Theme Parks.

As the fournder of House Of Vincenza - a Design Development and Production House I have been hired multiple times to set up on location fashion and costume design development and sewing production rooms at hotels, stadiums, arenas and convention centers for clients including Microsoft, Beyoncé's Formation World Tour, Justin Bieber's Believe Film and more.

I don't just talk the talk, I walk the walk.

My Design House team has produced hundreds of costumes on demand for live entertainment shows including Enchant Christmas and the first LEGO World Parade, which were costumes built so well, they were able to use them for daily, for multiple years.

The costume industry has long ago figured out how to do this, why can't fashion?

My work is on display in museums including the Hard Rock Cafe San Francisco.

I tell you all of this not to impress you, but because it is the living credential that makes what I am about to say worth listening to: the system is broken by design and I have solutions.

The Modern Garment District Model is a front-of-house showroom and back-of-house production system built on one non-negotiable principle: nothing moves to production without validation, and nothing is produced without demand. It is not theory. House of Vincenza, my Florida-based design and production house, has operated on this model since its founding. Vault Development Studio is the systems architecture layer I built to make the Modern Garment District Model replicable across cities worldwide.