Compost, Part One.

A few months ago I shared a confession on my Instagram account about something that I was in a lock-step with shame over. Since April of 2023, when I closed Miranda Bennett Studio (MBS)—an apparel collection, plant dye and manufacturing facility, and brick-and-mortar store—I had been paying for a storage unit to park many hundreds of pieces of leftover inventory. With the encouragement of a new creative consultant, I had vowed that May would be the last month that I paid rent on that unit. The deadline loomed, but I still didn’t know what I would do, where it would go, how to find the alchemical forces that seemed necessary to turn what had become deadstock into something of value again.

As far as inventory goes, the lineup that remained was less than ideal: only a few styles and no colors, just black, white, and natural silk. A ton of depth, but little variety. The last year I was in business, we had pursued our largest single production run with an external partner, almost a year in the making from initial talks to delivery (which was so hyper-local that it was wheeled over to our production space from manufacturers just a few bays over). Ultimately, the timing could not have been worse. The announcement of our closure garnered far more sales than I ever could have imagined, so much so that we had to push our closure date up so our remaining skeleton crew could move through packing and dispatching them all before our final days. But this particular block of inventory was so deep, barely a dent was made in it.

I wanted to just donate it and move on, but the truth is that after the toll the business took on my family financially, if I could recoup something, anything, I had to. But I was still so resigned from those last years of running my business, all that I could imagine coming from the effort of trying to list and sell this remaining inventory was a flatline in sales. If it hadn’t moved during our closing sale, why would it now? My consultant recommended that I try dyeing the lighter units—in the process, I could reclaim the medium that had once meant so much to me but had become something of an albatross for my business.

My commitment to only offering colors in my collection that we dyed in-house with plant-based dyes, despite all of the resourcefulness in the world, led to production bottlenecks, limited dyed options, a lack of variety, and prohibitive costs. An ongoing investment in better equipment always seemed to remain one or two steps from coming fully online. I can see so clearly now how impossible I was making life for myself and my brand by remaining unwavering about that one piece of our story—how that aspect of our sustainability was actually entirely unsustainable.