What Does Fast Fashion Actually Produce? I Went Looking for the Numbers

I wanted to create a space where I could leave some actual figures on how much product by Audrey & Grace is creating for the market each year, to give a clear and honest look at what kind of effect the business might be having on the environment.

When you take a look, you'll see it's not a lot, even before you take into account all the processes I go through to make each product, and how I try to make the production of each one as sustainable as possible. The numbers are low. Last year, I didn't even produce enough garments to fulfil the annual average of how many garments Australians purchase, around 56 items per person according to The Australia Institute's 2024 research, for two people.

I was curious. I know I'm not producing much at all, and that's okay, but I thought, what does the output for the big fast and ultra fast fashion businesses actually look like, and what does it look like for some of our home-grown businesses. So why not do a comparison. I must admit, the numbers actually shocked me. I knew they'd be big, but breaking it down to daily figures made me feel a little sick.

I wasn't the only one who struggled to believe it. When I told my husband, he pulled out his calculator, and we worked out roughly how many garments a company would need to sell each year to be worth billions of dollars, guessing a very low average price per item. He reckoned the number would have to be enormous. Then I found an article with one company's actual disclosed revenue, tens of billions, for that company alone. When he tried to work out how many garments that meant in a year, his calculator gave up and handed us scientific notation instead of an actual number.

Let's take a look.

To start with, I find it hard to even type this. Shein don't list by product, maybe the calculator doesn't have that many zeros, they list by orders. They process approximately 2.95 million orders per day. Per day. And this is orders, not units, so you can imagine how much bigger the real number would be given their entire sales model is built around selling as many products as possible per order. Even if it was only doubled or tripled. If each order really was just a single piece, at that rate Shein would process everything I made in an entire financial year in about 2.5 seconds.

And then there's H&M. There are figures circulating for them, but H&M themselves have never confirmed the number in their own reporting, it comes from journalism, first reported around 2019-2021 and repeated ever since, so I'd expect the real number now is even higher. Based on that data, they were producing approximately 8.2 million garments per day. To put that in perspective, everything I made in an entire financial year, H&M produces in under a second.

I wanted to look at Country Road too, but alas, transparency on this appears to be non-existent. I did quite a bit of digging and found no information anywhere regarding units produced per year. This isn't to say it isn't out there somewhere, but it doesn't appear to be anywhere you or I could find.