Fabric Offcut Sales?

Update: offcuts and scraps are now available in limited quantities in the shop on a trial basis.

I have a lot of fabric pieces that aren’t useful to me but they could be useful to someone else – things like irregularly shaped off-cuts, end-of-the-roll pieces that are too small to use in a packraft kit, and fabric with manufacturing defects that I can’t work around. These are generally less than 1 m (1-3 feet) long and irregularly shaped. They could be useful for making smaller packrafting or camping accessories like drybags, attachment points, backpacks, collapsible sinks, and so on.

Occasionally I get an email from someone asking to purchase fabric pieces like these, and you might think that’s a perfect product-market fit – but what inevitably happens is that I get into an email back-and-forth with each person, figuring out what they want and what I can offer, and that takes so long I’d have to charge them an unreasonable price to make it worth my time.

I’ve considered various ways of dealing with this, and the only one I think might work efficiently would be to sell fabric scraps by weight. The customer could choose the type of fabric (e.g. 250 GSM packraft tube fabric, 450 GSM packraft floor fabric, etc.) and then each unit would be 1 kg (2.2 pounds) of fabric, so you could choose how many kilograms of fabric you want and I’d just grab enough pieces to make up that weight. (Example: 1 kg of 250 GSM fabric is 4 square meters – just divide 1000 grams per kilogram by 250 grams per square meter to get the number of square meters.) I’d start with the largest piece I have under that weight, and then make up the balance with smaller pieces.

The obvious downside of this approach is that you as a customer wouldn’t be able to choose the size and shape of the pieces, so you’d have to be content with whatever I chose.

In the “order notes” box you could indicate a color preference or minimum size preference, and I’d choose pieces according to those preferences whenever possible, but I wouldn’t always have the perfect piece for you so you might have to splice two pieces together to make your project work. In order to make this worth my time, you wouldn’t be able to email me beforehand to ask about the available sizes and colors – you’d just have to take a gamble.

Setting this up in the shop would take some time, so I’ll only do it if people want it – please leave a comment below if you think it’s a good idea. Also please leave a comment if you have a different idea about how I could make this work efficiently.

If fabric scraps are not something that people want to buy, I will see if a local school or daycare wants them for art projects, because I don’t want to send them to a landfill.

Note: This is just an idea – I do not have a date in mind for when this will be available (it might never be).