What already exists, and the gaps that survived checking.
Compiled 4 September 2026. 39 rows surveyed across 8 categories.
Being wrong about novelty is cheap to find out now and expensive to discover after building. This survey was compiled on 4 September 2026 by headless web research across resale platforms, fibre-identification hardware, textile standards and registries, folding robotics, virtual try-on, colour-typing products and doorstep collection services.
Every row carries the tier of its source and a confidence value. A tier does not measure whether a claim is true, only how close the source sits to the thing it describes, and confidence records how firmly the research pass could stand behind it. Rows below 0.7 are marked, and the sources that could not be fetched at all are listed at the bottom.
Built strictly from gaps the research confirmed by fetching sources, not from the absence of a hit in a single search. These are the reasons the project is worth continuing, and they are the part most likely to go stale, so they are dated.
Load-bearing
ThredUp, Vinted, Depop, Vestiaire Collective and eBay all rely on manual seller-entered measurements. Depop and eBay generate titles and categories from a photo, and neither derives dimensions. This is a confirmed gap across all five platforms rather than an inference from one.
Load-bearing
Near-infrared fibre identification works and is deployed at industrial scale. It has no listing-integrated consumer path. The cheapest confirmed option, Matoha, starts at GBP 1,149 of hardware plus GBP 199 a month for API access, which is small-business rather than consumer pricing. Everything else is enterprise, quote-only, and physically installed in a sorting facility.
No platform describes autonomous defect grading in its own materials. The ThredUp 12-point inspection is explicitly human-driven in the source found, and the machine-learning layer at Vestiaire Collective flags anomalies rather than grading condition.
Load-bearing
Confirmed across all eight standards and registries checked. The nearest candidate in public law is the Digital Product Passport under the Ecodesign Regulation, and the textiles-specific act defining it had not been adopted at the time of this research. The nearest candidate in open source is circularity.ID, which is a real GPL-3.0 standard but company-led rather than foundation-governed. This is a genuine open window, and also not something to build against a confirmed specification yet.
Load-bearing
Confirmed by two well-capitalised commercial failures, FoldiMate in 2021 and Laundroid in 2019, and by the fact that the most advanced published work more than five years later is still an arXiv paper rather than a product.
Load-bearing
The three leading open models, IDM-VTON, OOTDiffusion and CatVTON, all carry CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 on both code and weights. They are self-hostable in the technical sense and non-commercial in the legal sense. For a project that accepts only permissive licences, that gap is decisive rather than inconvenient.
Load-bearing
The consumer app space is busy: Dressika, BeautySpark, My Color Seasons, BodyMuse, Fytted and Abody.ai all occupy it. A targeted search found no peer-reviewed controlled study validating the seasonal typing system against clothing-satisfaction outcomes. Whether that reads as a warning about a low-differentiation market or an opening for an evidence-based challenger is genuinely unresolved, and this survey does not resolve it.
Load-bearing
Doorstep collection with a genuine revenue share exists here: Sellpy has been active since 2021, and Rebelle covers luxury. The three major Austrian charity channels, Humana, Carla and Volkshilfe, are donation-only with no payout to the donor. Österreichische Post pickup at EUR 3.48 is generic parcel logistics rather than resale-specific, and is a real usable building block.
The full FOSDEM 2026 schedule, roughly 1,079 events across more than 80 tracks, was searched directly against the primary schedule. There is no talk named open fabric or open textiles. The one genuine textile match is FreeSewing by Joost De Cock, an open-source parametric sewing-pattern generator with its code on Codeberg. It is a good project and it is not a garment-analysis or resale-listing tool, so it does not occupy this space. Recording that plainly is more useful than leaving a vague recollection standing.
| Item | What it does | Licensing | Source | Date | Confidence |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| ThredUp intake and processing | Warehouse OS with garment-on-hanger automation, a 12-point human inspection, and automated dimensioning and weighing at pack-out. | Proprietary, also sold as white-label resale-as-a-service. | Ecom Logistics Podcast [C] | undated | Weakly supported: 0.5 |
| Vinted listing flow | Manual seller-entered size, condition, material and measurement fields. No first-party AI grading. | Proprietary. Third-party tools such as Vintefy and AutoLister AI fill the gap. | Vinted Help Center [A] | undated | 0.7 |
| Depop AI listing | One photo suggests category, colour, brand and description. | Proprietary, free, in-app. | Depop Newsroom [A] | 2024-09-12 | 0.85 |
| Vestiaire Collective authentication | Around 60 in-house experts with physical tools, plus an internal machine-learning layer that flags anomalies. | Proprietary, no public API. | Vestiaire Collective FAQ [A] | undated | Weakly supported: 0.6 |
| eBay Magical Listing | Photo to AI-suggested title, category and item specifics. Accuracy reported as mixed. | Proprietary, no third-party API. | Value Added Resource [B] | 2026-02-21 | 0.8 |
| Item | What it does | Licensing | Source | Date | Confidence |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Matoha FabriTell | Handheld near-infrared fibre identification scanner. The cheapest confirmed route to fibre ID. | Proprietary hardware from GBP 1,149, plus GBP 199 per month for API access. MIT-licensed comms library. | matoha.com purchase page [C] | fetched 2026-09-04 | 0.78 |
| trinamiX mobile NIR | Industrial handheld spectrometer for fibre and blend identification. Feeds sorters and product-passport pipelines. | Proprietary hardware, app and cloud. B2B API exists, no published price. | trinamiX news [B] | 2023 to 2025 | 0.87 |
| Picvisa | Hyperspectral and AI industrial textile sorting line, deployed at Coleo Recycling in Galicia. | Proprietary, enterprise only, no API or open source. | Specim case study [C] | undated | 0.75 |
| Fibersort | Automated near-infrared and RGB textile sorter, roughly one garment per second. | Began as Interreg-funded R&D led by Circle Economy, now a commercial Valvan product line. | fibersort.com [B] | 2021 case study, current site | 0.75 |
| Refashion and SOEX TEXID line | Near-infrared and RGB material-recognition pilot line, co-funded under French extended producer responsibility. | A public-interest body funding a vendor-proprietary line. No price published. | Refashion Pro operating guide [B] | lineage from 2015 RESYNTEX | Weakly supported: 0.6 The primary PDF was fetched but could not be text-extracted. Figures come from search snippets, not the primary text. |
| Item | What it does | Licensing | Source | Date | Confidence |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| FOSDEM 2026 textile and garment talks | The full 2026 schedule of roughly 1,079 events across 80-plus tracks was searched directly. One genuine match: FreeSewing by Joost De Cock, an open-source parametric sewing-pattern generator. No talk named open fabric or open textiles exists. | FreeSewing itself is open source, code on Codeberg. | FOSDEM 2026 event page [A] | 2026-01-31 | 0.9 |
| Open Supply Hub, formerly the Open Apparel Registry | Free public global facility registry with standardised identifiers. | Open data plus a public API, run by a 501(c)(3) nonprofit. | Open Supply Hub [C] | rebranded November 2022 | 0.8 |
| Fashion Transparency Index | Annual brand-disclosure ranking. A disclosure measure, not a fabric score. | Data via WikiRate under CC BY-NC 4.0, view only, no public API. | Fashion Revolution [C] | latest edition 2025 | 0.75 |
| circularity.ID by circular.fashion | An open data standard for garment-level circularity metadata. The closest existing thing to the fabric score this project describes. | GPL-3.0 repository, active. Company-led rather than foundation-governed. | circularfashion on GitHub [A] | repo active August 2026, governance source 2022 | Weakly supported: 0.6 Governance evidence is from 2022 and was not re-confirmed. |
| Higg Index and the Cascale Materials Sustainability Index | Cradle-to-gate life-cycle scoring for materials. | Proprietary and paid via the Worldly platform. Flagged for greenwashing by the Norwegian Consumer Authority and the Dutch ACM. | Business of Fashion [B] | 2025 to 2026 | 0.72 |
| Textile Exchange GRS, OCS and RCS | Recycled and organic content chain-of-custody standards. | Standard documents are free to read. Certification requires a paid third-party audit. | Textile Exchange [C] | current | 0.75 |
| OEKO-TEX | Chemical-safety testing and certification through independent member institutes. | Paid certification. A public certified-products buying guide exists, with no confirmed API. | OEKO-TEX [C] | current | Weakly supported: 0.6 |
| Item | What it does | Licensing | Source | Date | Confidence |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Ecodesign for Sustainable Products Regulation (EU) 2024/1781 | The framework enabling ecodesign and Digital Product Passport requirements per product group. | In force since 18 July 2024. Passport data is open by design once product-specific acts exist. | European Parliament Legislative Observatory [A] | 2024-07-18 | 0.85 |
| ESPR acts on unsold apparel | Delegated and implementing acts banning the destruction of unsold apparel and footwear, with disclosure duties. Adopted. | Binds large companies from 19 July 2026. | European Commission [A] | 2026-02-09 | 0.9 |
| ESPR general textiles ecodesign and passport act | The full Digital Product Passport specification for textiles, covering durability, recycled content and passport fields. Not yet adopted. | Textiles is a named priority in the 2025 to 2030 working plan, with no confirmed date in the primary text. | European Commission working plan [A] | plan adopted April 2025 | Weakly supported: 0.55 The widely cited 2027 date could not be confirmed from Commission primary text. |
| Item | What it does | Licensing | Source | Date | Confidence |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| FoldiMate | Home laundry-folding robot. Demonstrated repeatedly without ever shipping a consumer unit. | Proprietary. Company defunct, operations ceased 30 August 2021. | Wikipedia [B] | 2021 | 0.85 |
| Laundroid by Seven Dreamers | Home laundry-folding robot, developed over roughly a decade. | Proprietary. Bankrupt 23 April 2019, with around 2.2 billion yen of debt and roughly 200 creditors. | TechCrunch [B] | 2019-04-23 | 0.9 |
| SpeedFolding, GarmentPile, DexGarmentLab, Instant-Fold | Academic robotics on reinforcement-learning and vision-based cloth manipulation. Still lab stage. The most advanced published work, Instant-Fold from June 2026, is an arXiv paper rather than a product. | Open-source research, no shipping product. | arXiv [A] | 2022 to 2026 | 0.8 |
| Item | What it does | Licensing | Source | Date | Confidence |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Google Shopping virtual try-on | A free consumer feature in Search, Shopping and Images, with automatic merchant opt-in. | Consumer feature, not merchant-callable as an API. | Google Merchant Center [A] | current | 0.85 |
| Google Vertex AI Virtual Try-On | A separate paid cloud API for try-on imagery generation. | API available, enterprise pricing. | Google Cloud documentation [A] | current | 0.8 |
| Zalando on-model imagery | Around 70 percent of fourth-quarter 2024 editorial imagery was AI generated, alongside a 3D fitting-room pilot. | Proprietary and in-house, not sold externally. | Bloomberg [B] | 2026-08-21 | 0.7 |
| Botika, Lalaland.ai, VModel | AI on-model image generation sold as software for e-commerce. | Proprietary, paid tiers roughly USD 22 to 230 per month. Lalaland.ai was acquired by Browzwear in July 2025. | just-style [B] | 2025 to 2026 | Weakly supported: 0.65 Pricing tiers vary by vendor and were not all confirmed from primary pages. |
| IDM-VTON, OOTDiffusion, CatVTON | Diffusion-based open-source virtual try-on models. Self-hostable in the technical sense. | Code and weights are both CC BY-NC-SA 4.0, so non-commercial use only. Not usable in a commercial product without a separate licence. | OOTDiffusion licence on GitHub [A] | fetched 2026-09-04 | 0.85 |
| Item | What it does | Licensing | Source | Date | Confidence |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Dressika, BeautySpark, My Color Seasons, BodyMuse, Fytted, Abody.ai | Selfie-based 12-season colour typing and body-shape scanning with recommendations. A crowded consumer app space. | Proprietary consumer apps. | BeautySpark blog [C] | 2026 | Weakly supported: 0.5 Sourced from a vendor blog round-up rather than independent review. |
| Open-source colour-analysis repositories | Twelve-class seasonal colour classifiers and palette-based clothing retrieval. Small, hobby scale. | Open source on GitHub. | SeasonalColourClassification [C] | undated | 0.7 |
| Seasonal colour analysis validation evidence | A targeted search found no peer-reviewed controlled study validating the 4-season or 12-season typing system against clothing-satisfaction outcomes. This is a reported absence of evidence, not evidence of absence. | Not applicable. | npj Digital Medicine, on skin-tone tools broadly [A] | 2024 | 0.75 |
| Item | What it does | Licensing | Source | Date | Confidence |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| ThredUp Clean Out Kit | Mail-in kit where ThredUp lists and sells, with consignment payout up to 80 percent on the premium tier. | Proprietary service, United States. | Modern Retail [B] | 2024-06-14 | 0.7 |
| Vinted Pro | A verified professional-seller badge with tools. Not a doorstep pickup-and-sell-for-you concierge. | Proprietary service. | vintieplus blog [C] | 2026 | Weakly supported: 0.55 Community blog source, not confirmed against Vinted's own documentation. |
| Momox Fashion, formerly ubup | Fixed-price buyout rather than consignment or revenue share. | Proprietary service. Austrian availability unverified. | FashionUnited DE [B] | 2021-01-20 | Weakly supported: 0.65 Austrian availability was not confirmed. |
| Rebelle | Luxury consignment concierge that photographs, lists, ships and authenticates. Core markets include Germany, Austria and Switzerland. | Proprietary service. Exact commission percentage unverified. | Textilwirtschaft [B] | undated | Weakly supported: 0.55 The seller-terms page could not be fetched, so the commission remains unverified. |
| Sellpy | Consignment resale backed by the IKEA and H&M groups, active in Austria since 2021. The closest existing thing to the handoff loop described here. | Proprietary. Payout is 40 percent up to EUR 50 and 70 percent above, with a EUR 1.20 listing fee. | Sellpy Help [A] | current | 0.8 |
| willhaben | No dedicated resale-for-you service was found. Pure classifieds with paid promotion tools. | Proprietary classifieds. | EntreNous [C] | 2024 | Weakly supported: 0.4 willhaben.at could not be fetched directly, so this rests on search results alone. |
| Humana Austria, Carla by Caritas Wien, Volkshilfe | Donation to charity resale. None of the three operates any revenue share back to the donor. | NGO services. | Humana Austria [B] | undated | Weakly supported: 0.65 Confirmed from the organisations' own pages rather than independent reporting. |
| Österreichische Post Abholservice | Doorstep parcel pickup, nationwide, Monday to Friday. Confirmed live and current. | Proprietary service. Flat EUR 3.48 for up to five parcels. | post.at Abholservice [A] | fetched 2026-09-04 | 0.85 |
Reported rather than omitted. Each of these is a remote failure: an HTTP error, an empty body, or a PDF whose text could not be extracted. None was a local firewall block, since these fetches run server-side rather than through this machine.
| Target | Issue | Impact |
|---|---|---|
| EUR-Lex, five URL forms of Regulation 2024/1781 | Empty response body on every attempt, consistent with a script or cookie wall. | The Ecodesign Regulation was sourced through the European Parliament Legislative Observatory instead, still tier A. |
| European Commission working plan PDF, COM(2025) 187 final | Fetched with HTTP 200, but the binary PDF stream was not text-extractable. | The textiles passport timeline is reported as unverified and secondary-sourced. |
| Refashion and SOEX operating guide PDFs | Fetched, but PDF text was unparseable with no local extractor available. | Throughput figures for that line are flagged at 0.6 confidence. |
| Vestiaire Collective journal article on expert authentication | HTTP 403. | The platform FAQ was used as a working substitute. |
| Modern Materials Handling article on ThredUp | HTTP 403. | Garment-on-hanger detail came from a secondary podcast transcript, and confidence was lowered accordingly. |
| Taylor and Francis, a 2019 paper on a personal colour analysis app | HTTP 403. | The rigour of that paper could not be assessed beyond its title. |
| ThredUp Clean Out guide | HTTP 403. | Modern Retail was used as the working substitute. |
| willhaben.at | Fetch failed outright. | The absence of a resale-for-you service could not be confirmed directly and rests on search results, hence the 0.4 confidence on that row. |
| Rebelle seller terms | Socket closed, then a connection reset on retry. | The exact Rebelle commission remains unverified. |
| Circle Economy Fibersort programme page | Redirected, then HTTP 404. | Weak circumstantial evidence that Circle Economy has stepped back from Fibersort. Not conclusive alone. |