Meet Piarvé Wetshi (29) and Deborah Lyons, founders of Last Yarn, a hub for surplus textiles preventing them from being sent to landfill. Last Yarn is enabling a second life to fabrics which otherwise would be considered as deadstock.

Piarvé Wetshi

Read Last Yarn’s feature with UKFT Rise below:

Company launched in: January 2022

My background is in… digital marketing in the interior design world.

I decided to start my business because… I had a personal fabric stash and before the pandemic I gave most of it away to my secondary school. I may have been influenced by the amount of beautiful surplus textiles (primarily cottons hand printed in Scotland) I witnessed from working in interior design. I was based in our Hackney showroom where we discontinued the fabric line, which left our warehouse in Leeds full of fabrics we had to sell at over 70% under RRP. I realised that there wasn’t a place for sellers and buyers to connect and exchange textiles.

I started receiving donations from local fashion designers and requests from creatives – and I started piloting the idea of circulating textiles at a pop-up space in South London. When the pandemic happened I joined forces with womenswear designer Deborah Lyons and we started Last Yarn, as we had the same desire to tackle fabric waste in the fashion industry.

Something that really helped in getting my business of the ground is… a determined team and cheerleaders that can connect with the long term vision, which is so important at the beginning. Having an ace web developer, our initial supplier that believed in us and having an amazing co-founder has meant we can get started.

An area of business I’d like to gain more knowledge of is… measuring impact. The new Green Claims Code that has been implemented to tackle greenwashing should change the way that brands communicate their “sustainability message” – I think this is great. The most relatable brands find intelligent ways to share what they are already doing, and the best way to do this is using the correct metrics to measure impact. I think AI and data will play a huge role in this, and I’d like to know more about how we can work with AI and technology.

Three important qualities for an entrepreneur are… vision, understanding people and a strong work ethic.

A UKFT Rise subscriber I find inspiring would be… Rosette Ale from Revival. I love the way that she works with denim, all of her pieces are wearable, striking and can be dressed up or down. I love the way that she has paved her own path and she is authentic to herself and has a strong mission to make denim sexy whilst diverting the material from landfill.

Something happening in the industry that’s inspiring me right now is… the movement around biomaterials. Although I love traditional fabrics such as wool and linen, which can be grown naturally and ethically using methods such as regenerative farming (and are very accessible materials in the UK), I believe the biomaterials movement is an example of fashion becoming interdisciplinary and pushing boundaries to find solutions by partnering with scientists and researchers to design out waste and create new systems and processes.

A change I’d like to see in the industry would be… focusing on textiles just as much as garments. I want to see textile workers being paid fairly, as farmers and weavers are low paid across the globe, yet textile production requires heavy labour and it is the foundation for the fashion industry. I’d like to see large brands sharing the journey a fibre makes before being spun into the final textile and cleverly sharing this through campaigns.

VISIT THE LAST YARN WEBSITE