Fast fashion is a masterclass in business mismanagement. 85% of textiles are wasted annually as last season’s styles are sent to landfills.

Diarra Bousso, a former Wall Street trader turned fashion designer, has cut textile waste in her own label, DIARRABLU, by 60% through her AI-enabled design process.

By using AI from prototyping through production, Diarra is blueprinting a future of retail brands that are cash flow positive, zero-waste, not inventory-dependent, and directly informed by customer demand.

The problem: Operating in the dark

Most fashion brands operate in a fundamentally wasteful and cost-prohibitive way: they mass-produce inventory before confirming consumer demand, leading to massive overstock.

“A typical fashion company is kind of like a restaurant that makes a thousand cheeseburgers a day and prays that they'll sell – and when they don’t, they throw it all away,” Diarra said. “They have all their cash tied into this inventory.”

The root cause of this waste is the slow and disconnected method of traditional fashion prototyping, which requires huge investments before testing market interest.

“Designers spend months in isolation doing their magic,” Diarra says. “They only know if what they created is good once they launch it and see if people buy it.”

The result is an industry full of sunk costs and sub-optimal ROI – and Diarra is proving that.

The solution: Accelerated AI-powered prototyping

Diarra has developed an end-to-end, algorithmic process for everything from prototyping to pressure-testing.

In her days as a math teacher, Diarra realized that some trigonometry and geometry equations in a graphing calculator are visualized in floral patterns – a design she now uses as her signature print.

This graphing tool – Desmos – allows Diarra to generate new patterns for her textiles in seconds by just changing the equation. From there, she uses her own proprietary AI tool to polish the design and render previews of the pattern on virtual garments and accessories to prototype a full collection.

To model the prototyped garments, Diarra created a series of 4 realistic avatars that she crowdsourced from her own customers by asking her community for their skin tone, height, and body shape. This allows her team (and their buyers) to understand how their designs will look on their target audience.

To render the prototypes on the avatars, Diarra uses Midjourney and other publicly available AI tools to simulate real fabric, generate videos of how that fabric will lay, flow, and move, and adapt the avatars to show how the garments will look against different skin colors and body types.

Once these final designs are created, Diarra posts them to social media and allows her customers to vote on the colors, patterns, and designs they want to buy – which cuts out the cost, time, and necessity for samples to be created. She simply orders the fabric her customers want and lists the products they liked best.

A process that used to take Diarra hours – and for many businesses still takes weeks if not months – can now be done in minutes, and cuts out the uncertainty of consumer demand.

The result: Consumer champions and near-zero waste

DIARRABLU has no inventory – just bolts of fabric. Customers can input their height and size and use DIARRABLU’s avatars to see how a garment will look on them before ordering it to those specifications.

So instead of producing in bulk and hoping for demand, DIARRABLU makes clothing to order. No overproduction, no waste, no excess inventory.

“I buy all the ingredients and they don't perish, so I can assemble and make any meal from them, so to speak,” Diarra says.

This combination of generative tech and human craft creates a closed-loop system: designs are validated digitally, manufactured ethically, and distributed with no waste.

And because consumers are reflected in the avatars DIARRABLU uses to model prototypes – and they get a say in what gets created – they’re more bought into the brand and the collections they helped co-create.

This translates to ROI in a few ways:

• Over 60% reduction in fabric waste thanks to digital prototyping and community-driven design selection.
• The company has been cash flow positive since inception without raising external funding because they have no unsold stock.
• Time to prototype is minutes vs. weeks and time to production is a matter of days vs. a matter of months.

And because this model is valuable to every retail business, not just the fashion industry, Diarra is considering licensing her proprietary AI prototyping tool to others – creating an entirely new revenue stream for her business.

The blueprint for human-centered AI creative

Diarra dismisses the fears about AI taking over creative fields. “It can’t do what you do,” she says. “You still have to prompt it!”

She sees AI as an amplifier – it makes you more of what you already are. If you’re lazy, AI will make you lazier. If you’re curious, AI will push you to do more. If you’re a creative, you’ll still be at the core of your creative work …  if you’re using AI in the right way.

"Saying ‘AI will replace me’ is like saying, ‘I used to handwrite all my letters, but now I have a printer’. The beauty in your letter stays the same, because that's your brain. The printer is just completing it faster."

And retail businesses need this systematic change. In the US alone, retail generates over $2 billion in waste annually. For leaders looking to start this kind of transformation, Diarra has a few words of wisdom:

• Expect the stigma. People feel shame over using AI for a variety of reasons. The cure-all for that stigma is public celebration. Diarra keeps a master list of AI hacks her team has shared, and shouts them out in team meetings.
  
  
• Save the big picture for the board. Don’t bust in on day one talking about agents and automation. Ease people in. Go department by department and give them digestible use cases where they can see a clear before and after.
  
  
• Consider getting some perspective. Diarra recommends bringing in consultants who can see your bottlenecks more clearly than you can. In order to transform your business, you need to be able to look past the way it’s done right now and picture what it can be.