Visionary of textiles
Alum Borre Akkersdijk created a sustainable way for emerging brands to produce their lines
“We are really making the medium of knitting and textile-making accessible to the world.”
What is your vision for the future?
“At the moment, we’re a textile company with a digital tool. I think in the future we’ll be a textile platform where we are a bridge between architects and brands and creators, where creators can design and sell and propose their own textiles.”
—BORRE AKKERSDIJK
By Liz Leyden
A decade into his career as a buzzy designer of futuristic 3D knits, Borre Akkersdijk began to wonder: Did the world need another fashion brand?
The FIT alum had launched his Amsterdam-based clothing line ByBorre specifically to spotlight the groundbreaking textiles he’d been creating since he was a student. The brand’s growing success, including collaborations with Adidas and Japanese outerwear specialist Descente, was secondary to Akkersdijk’s main mission: digitizing textile design.
He first developed his signature squishy knits in 2008 using a reprogrammed circular knitting machine meant for making mattresses, an ingenious hack that eventually earned him a 2012 Dutch Design Award.
Over time, the scope of Akkersdijk’s innovative work with textiles evolved to include the supply chain from which they emerged. Building his brand, he sourced ethically made yarns and fibers and sought responsible production partners. He also prioritized fit-to-purpose design to reduce waste from excess sampling and overproduction.
In 2020, a lightbulb went off.
“We said, ‘What is the core of our business?’” Akkersdijk says. “Is it clothing, or is it actually our supply chain and our textiles? And then we realized that we can change the industry with the textiles we make.”
The clarity of the answer provided a new mission for the company—and for Akkersdijk himself.
These days, ByBorre’s seasonal collections are gone, replaced by a digital design tool that allows creators across industries direct access to the textiles themselves. Akkersdijk’s trademark techniques remain intact, but are now available to everyone, from designers at legendary surf brand Rip Curl and Dutch sneaker company Neutra (both recent clients) to curious Hue readers.
“We are really making the medium of knitting and textile-making accessible to the world,” he says.
Akkersdijk’s goal is not only to reimagine responsible textile production for ByBorre clients, but also to spark an industry-wide conversation about sustainability that inspires other companies to follow suit.
The design tool’s software guides creators through ByBorre’s curated yarn library (including a durable polyester made in Italy from upcycled plastic bottles) and helps them tailor the textile to a product’s end use, whether as cycling gear for Rapha or interior fabrics for Social Hub hotels. And, in a repudiation of the often murky origins of fabric, each design comes with a “passport” that tracks the route of its raw materials through the supply chain and assesses the environmental impact of production.
Designing digitally lets creators experiment on-screen to achieve their exact vision—“What you see is what you get,” Akkersdijk says—and eliminates the need for excess sampling. To further reduce waste, ByBorre accepts production orders for as little as 50 meters.
“I think every bit of fiber or raw material that you create just to throw away is too valuable,” Akkersdijk says, adding, “Overproduction is a crime. That sounds radical, but think of where we are heading, of how valuable resources are becoming.”
Akkersdijk’s quest to create the textile production method of the future is gaining traction; the company has hosted recent workshops to demonstrate the design tool and discuss its transparent supply chain not only for fashion brands, but also for architecture firms and automakers like BMW and Rivian.
“The new system needs to be more accurate, more responsible, more efficient in all the steps so we only produce what we use,” he says. “For me, the future is building that new system.”