Fashion does not suffer from a lack of ideas. Every season brings new materials, new sustainability claims, new tools, and new promises of transformation. But what it does lack is the ability to turn any of those ideas into something that holds up in manufacturing, at scale, and on real human bodies.
In this Seamless conversation, Aaron Jackson, CTO at trail running brand Outopia and former Director of Raw Material Innovation at lululemon, offers a rare, unfiltered perspective from someone who has spent two decades inside the machinery of product creation. From fibre engineering to factory floors, global sourcing to local micro-studios, Aaron’s career has been defined by building the systems that turn ideas into real products.
In fashion, the difference between good, better, and best is rarely about creativity. It is about whether an idea can move from a single successful sample to a repeatable system.
Good ideas are easy. Better ideas survive testing. The best ones survive reality.
Show me that it works at 100,000 units. Not in the lab. Not in a pitch deck. In the real world.
🎥 Watch the full discussion below, and read on for the full editorial feature.
Fashion has lost its grip on reality.
New fibres are announced before factories can process them. New materials are promoted before durability is tested. New sustainability narratives are built before any real infrastructure exists to support them. The industry moves fast at the level of concept, but painfully slowly at the level of execution.
Aaron’s critique is not philosophical or ideological. It is operational:
If it does not scale, it is not innovation. It is just a prototype.
In his view, true innovation is not novelty. It is engineering something that can survive manufacturing variance, logistics constraints, cost structures, quality control, and real consumer behaviour, including washing, wear, and abuse.
That is the part of the system most people never see.
And it is also where most ideas die.
Most breakthroughs never make it beyond the conceptual layer. They collapse in the gap between what sounds good in theory and what can actually be produced, repeated, and maintained in practice.
This gap is the least glamorous part of fashion. It is where spreadsheets replace mood boards, and where physics replaces storytelling. It is also the part of the system the industry pays the least attention to, even though it determines almost everything.
The industry quietly erased its own technical brain.
Where brands once employed textile engineers who could move fluently from fibre to fabric to garment, many now rely on layers of coordinators and project managers whose primary role is communication rather than technical problem-solving.
A textile engineer can go from fibre to fabric to garment. That capability is disappearing.
This shift is subtle, but its impact is enormous.
Without deep technical expertise inside the organisation, brands lose their ability to challenge suppliers on substance rather than aesthetics. Material development becomes dependent on external partners. Manufacturing limitations are discovered late, when they are expensive or impossible to fix. When things fail, no one can trace the failure back to first principles.
Innovation becomes something you describe, not something you build.
The industry still looks advanced on the surface; there are more tools, more platforms, more software, more dashboards than ever before. But underneath, the technical literacy required to make any of those tools meaningful has eroded.
Fashion did not automate expertise. It outsourced it.
Most product failures are designed long before they are manufactured.
Manufacturers generally deliver exactly what they are asked for. The problem is that what they are asked for is often incoherent.
Design briefs are filled with abstract language such as premium, high performance, luxury hand feel, technical stretch, and comfort compression. These terms carry emotional meaning, but very little engineering precision.
When mills are forced to interpret creatively, samples bounce back and forth and timelines stretch. Everyone blames production.
But the real failure happens long before anything is made.
Factories hit what is in the tech pack. The breakdown happens before it reaches them.
The issue is not execution. It is translation.
Fashion designs in metaphors. Manufacturing operates in physics. Most breakdowns occur in the space between those two languages, where intent has not yet been converted into technical reality.
By the time a garment fails on the factory floor, it has usually already failed the brief.
Raw material development has become a relay, not a bridge.
In theory, raw material teams should sit at the centre of this translation process. Their role should be to convert creative ambition into physical possibility.
In practice, they are often reduced to logistics functions, passing briefs to suppliers and passing samples back to designers without meaningful technical intervention.
They are not developing materials. They are relaying messages.
What is missing is mediation:
Someone who can interpret brand DNA in technical terms.
Someone who can filter ideas through feasibility before sampling begins.
Someone who can stress-test concepts against known manufacturing constraints.
Without that layer, brands and factories operate in parallel universes. Everyone is busy and working hard, but almost no one is solving the actual problem.
Sustainability is a physics problem pretending to be a marketing one.
If you make synthetic clothing, you are a petrochemical company. Own it.
The industry continues to promote eco narratives while remaining structurally dependent on fossil-based chemistry. Pretending otherwise may create moral comfort, but no environmental progress.
Real sustainability is not about optics, but about infrastructure.
Chemical recycling.
Bio-based feedstocks.
Durability over disposability.
Designing systems that prioritise longevity rather than volume churn.
The biggest sustainability failure is not lack of intent. It is lack of honesty about trade-offs.
Until the industry confronts the physical realities of what its products are made from and how long they last, sustainability will remain something it talks about more than something it practices.
Local manufacturing is an economic choice.
Micro-factories and local-for-local production are often framed as inherently virtuous. But there is only meaningful potential if brands confront the brutal economics behind them.
One garment costs the same as a thousand if you cannot fill the system.
Without sufficient throughput, unit costs explode. Utilisation collapses. “Local” becomes branding rather than a viable operating model.
Local manufacturing is not an ethical stance. It is a systems design problem.
If the volume economics do not work, the values do not matter.
3D and AI cannot escape physics.
There is a lot of mythology surrounding digital product creation workflows.
3D can dramatically reduce waste in early-stage design and it can remove huge volumes of sales samples and physical iteration. But once garments interact seriously with the body through compression, stretch, or performance fit, simulation breaks down.
Loose clothing is easy. Compression is where everything breaks.
At that point, physical prototyping remains unavoidable. The body introduces variables that current digital systems cannot model reliably.
AI faces an even deeper limitation: knowledge itself.
AI only works on what is written down. And this industry does not document failures.
Fashion hoards intellectual property. It avoids publishing mistakes. It protects personal expertise. The result is an industry that systematically forgets its own lessons.
AI cannot transcend that culture.
It can only optimise what already exists.
Without radical knowledge sharing, AI becomes a mirror, not a breakthrough.
Outopia was built as a system first, a brand second.
Outopia is where all of these ideas stop being theory.
After two decades inside global brands, Aaron chose to build something smaller, slower, and structurally different. Not a label built around trend cycles or marketing narratives, but a performance brand designed around system integrity from day one.
At Outopia, material development starts with what can actually be manufactured, not what looks good in a concept deck. Design decisions are filtered through feasibility before aesthetics. Prototypes are treated as learning tools, not just visual assets. Factories are partners in problem-solving, not anonymous endpoints.
The goal is not to move fast. It is to move coherently.
Instead of optimising for seasonal novelty, Outopia optimises for repeatability. Instead of chasing scale first, it designs the system that could scale later. Instead of separating creative and technical teams, it treats them as the same problem.
This is not about being small for the sake of it. It is about rebuilding the entire product logic that large brands have gradually lost.
Outopia works not because it is more innovative than everyone else, but because it is structurally aligned with reality. The brand is built around manufacturing constraints, not in spite of them. Around material truth, not storytelling. Around physics, not hype.
In other words, it is designed for the part of the system most people never see.
Innovation is not a tools problem. It is a systems problem.
Fashion needs technical literacy.
It needs documented failure.
It needs structures that allow ideas to survive reality.
Aaron’s worldview is quietly radical because it strips innovation of glamour. It replaces futurism with engineering. It reframes creativity as system design.
Good ideas are everywhere in fashion. Better ones make it to market.
But only the best survive scale, pressure, and reality.
And in an industry built almost entirely on concepts, that may be the most uncomfortable truth of all.
