This category-changing sticker patch instantly mends fabric

FastCompany: It’s 7:52 a.m. Your 4-year-old has dressed herself, which is a win. She’s chosen a pink tutu and a rainbow-striped T-shirt. You make peace with the fact that it is stained with strawberry juice. But then you see a tiny, unmistakable hole close to the collar. So you scramble to find another top, throwing the T-shirt into the pile that needs mending. The problem is you keep procrastinating on these repairs—since sewing or ironing on patches takes time—and by the time you get around to it, most of the clothes don’t fit your child anymore. Ultimately, the whole pile goes in the trash, because you can’t resell clothes with holes or tears in them.

But imagine a different reality: What if you could peel a sticker off a sheet, press it onto the shirt, and send your child out the door in it? [Photo: Katt Jones/New New Patch] That’s the product Prue Linehan has spent three years developing. Her Brooklyn-based startup, New New Patch , makes printed fabric patches that adhere to clothing with no sewing, ironing, or 15-minute tumble drying. Once you stick one onto the garment, it will stay on wash after wash. A sheet of 12 stickers costs $20, and they’re available through the brand’s website, as well as independent kids’ stores in New York.

“Over the last couple of decades, the innovation in apparel has been to make replacing them frictionless,” Linehan says. “But what if we could make it more convenient to patch the garment than to replace it?” [Photo: Emily Hlavac Green/New New Patch] We used to know how to fix our clothes For most of human history, clothing was one of the most expensive things a household owned. In 1901, the average American family spent 14% of its household budget on apparel, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Since they were so valuable, garments were repaired, handed down, and up-cycled. Most people had no choice but to learn how to mend.

During the Industrial Revolution, apparel manufacturing began to happen at scale, lowering the price of clothes. Then, over the last 50 years, thanks to globalization and the fast fashion movement, companies found ways to make clothes so cheap they were basically disposable. By 2002, the share of household spending on apparel had dropped to 4.2%, and it is likely even less now. These days, a T-shirt made in Bangladesh from polyester is so cheap—sometimes as low as $4—that it doesn’t make economic sense to repair it. Many parents’ time is too valuable to mend their children’s clothes.

[Photo: Emily Hlavac Green/New New Patch] However, this has horrific consequences for the planet. The EPA estimates that Americans generate around 17 million tons of textile waste a year, of which about 11.3 million tons ends up in landfill. Globally, the figure is even starker: The Ellen MacArthur Foundation estimates that a garbage truck of clothing is getting dumped or burned every second . Only about 15% of discarded textiles are recycled or reused. Hopefully this will change as recycling technologies like Circ gain ground. But for now, the environmental math is brutal.

[Photo: Katt Jones/New New Patch] The patch hasn’t changed since the Civil War Patching is an ancient craft. Humans have been cutting fabric and covering holes for thousands of years. Along the way, there have been some innovations. In 1863, the Swiss inventor Isaak Groebli built an embroidery machine that could produce embroidered designs at scale. This meant, for the first time, a patch could carry a design, such as a logo. This led to a boom in patches, from military insignia to scouting badges to band logos on punk vests.

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The introduction of a no-sew, peel-and-stick fabric patch is significant for the sustainability movement in fashion, offering a novel solution that appeals to parents, though its direct relevance to broader brand strategy professionals may be limited.