Written by The fashion industry has a waste problem. Every year, 92 million tonnes of textile waste is generated globally, while garment use has decreased by 36 percent since 2000, meaning clothes are being made faster and discarded sooner than ever before. Waste is built into the process from the start, where roughly 15% of fabric used in garment manufacturing is wasted before a finished product even exists, cut away as scraps on the factory floor.
While there is a growing global sustainability movement to challenge traditional manufacturing, independent designers are constrained, cut off from the expensive tools and industry networks needed to prototype sustainably, test new ideas, or find partners willing to prioritize circularity over speed. Without access to those resources, even the most ambitious sustainable vision stalls at the concept stage.
VORN – The Berlin Fashion Hub, was built to change that. Located in Bikini Berlin, VORN is both a physical and digital space where innovations for the sustainable development of the fashion industry are collaboratively designed, communicated, and implemented. As a registered cooperative, its goal is to achieve economically successful circularity in the fashion and textile industry while taking social responsibility and reducing CO2 emissions.
VORN pursues that mission through four interconnected programs. Its Community Services vertical offer members a streamlined digital platform for networking, events, and expert meetups, creating the connective tissue that makes collaboration possible. Its Innovation Lab goes further, bringing brands, startups, and researchers together to prototype concepts across physical and digital landscapes, with direct access to specialized hardware and software so that emerging ideas are not just visionary but technically achievable and ready for market. Anchoring all of this is a physical Coworking Space in the heart of Berlin, offering and flexible desks as a tangible home for the next generation of fashion innovators.
That model of open, collaborative innovation does not stop at Berlin’s city limits! Through make-a-thek, a joint project with GIG and other partners, VORN is extending its approach far beyond its own walls. make-a-thek brings modular, easy-to-replicate makerspaces into public libraries, focused on fashion and crafts and built around open access to circular approaches to making and design. Through community co-creation, the project is developing a practical toolkit and open educational resources to help libraries anywhere set up their own fashion and craft-focused makerspaces, building a growing collection of blueprints and instructions that any hub in the network can adopt and adapt.
The result is a system for sharing knowledge, not just tools. Solutions developed in one city can travel to another, and standards for circular practice laboratories emerge from collective experimentation rather than top-down prescription. In cities as different as Berlin and Nairobi, the challenge of textile waste looms large, impacting communities in distinct ways but with equally urgent consequences. make-a-thek serves as the vehicle for that distribution, demonstrating how knowledge flows through a network, adapts to meet different community needs, and magnifies its impact globally.
We see this partnership as a model for how specialised hubs can strengthen the wider maker movement. By focusing on fashion, VORN identifies problems that require both technical and social solutions. Working with GIG, those solutions can reach a network spanning many countries and backgrounds. Innovation in this sense is not just about new products but about new systems, and with our collaboration with VORN in the make-a-thek project, that commitment becomes a living resource for the entire GIG community.
In 2026, the project continues to grow with new contributions from makers, fashion designers, and innovators around the world. Explore the growing collection of resources and tools, and follow our global community of fashion designers and artisans putting the make-a-thek learnings to work in their own spaces.
