Kenchen Bharwani: The Woman Turning Fashion’s Leftovers Into America’s Best Bargains
“The question the industry has always asked is: why is there so much waste?” says Kenchen Bharwani from her New York office, where technical spec sheets share shelf space with fabric swatches from three continents. “I ask a different question. Why is there no one connecting the waste to the buyer who needs it? That gap isn’t a mystery. It’s a precision problem, and precision is exactly what I’ve spent two decades building.”
It’s a characteristically measured statement from a woman whose career has been built on precision over performance. Bharwani is a fashion consultant specializing in international sourcing and off-price apparel, and the methodology she has developed over nearly two decades lives where global manufacturing meets American retail, a space where most industry professionals operate on one side or the other, but almost never both. She has spent her entire career occupying that gap.
Bharwani began her career at a garment export company that had established connections with manufacturers sitting on excess inventory. What the company lacked was the other half of the equation: buyers. Her job was to find them, which meant learning from the ground up how to identify and connect with importers who could absorb surplus goods in foreign markets. It was a formative education in the problem she would spend her career solving.
She moved through North American trade markets in Canada, building expertise in cross-border sourcing and compliance, before eventually establishing herself in New York’s off-price retail sector. What she accumulated across those years was the unique fluency in this field.
“I have spent my career learning to speak two languages at once, the language of the factory and the language of the store,” she says. “Very few people in this field speak both fluently. That is not an accident. It takes a number of years.”
The measure of standing in any industry is not who you seek out, it is who seeks you out. By that measure, what unfolded during Bharwani’s visit to Pakistan was telling. The Pakistan Chamber of Commerce had extended her a formal written invitation to visit a major apparel facility holding cancelled merchandise, goods representing months of production and labor with no viable secondary pathway to market. Word moved through local manufacturing networks before she arrived, and by the time she was there, established manufacturers had come independently with their own excess stock, to seek her assessment if they would be workable for the U.S. market.
It is the behavior of an industry toward an authority, not a buyer. “When I walked into that factory, I understood within the first hour what the real problem was,” Kenchen recalls. “They did not have a shortage of product. They had a shortage of context. What no one had ever explained to them was precisely what it would take for that garment to survive in a U.S. off-price environment, ranging from the fabric compositions, labelling standards, color assortments, and size specifications. That translation is what I do.”
In Ethiopia, Bharwani encountered a manufacturer holding leftover performance fabric with no committed buyer. The conventional response would have been to note the inventory’s limitations and move on. Instead, she built. Drawing on U.S. consumer sizing data, off-price category demand, and price-point modelling, she developed an activewear program from scratch, an initial run of 164,000 units calibrated for U.S. retail. The program was later showcased at African Sourcing and Fashion Week, generating a follow-on order of 430,000 units picked up by Gor Factory Spain for its Roly’s brand, a program that did not exist before she arrived.
According to the factory, this engagement helped sustain employment at the factory during a period of global order cancellations. For the broader industry, it proved that her methodology is generative, not merely evaluative. She does not just assess what exists; she builds what the market is missing.
Bharwani’s influence has extended well beyond individual client engagements. She has spoken at the Turkey International Conference on Business, Management, Educational Strategies and Technological Integration, arguing that redirecting surplus fashion is more effective, more immediate, and more scalable than redesigning production systems. Her reach has also extended into U.S. entrepreneurship circles, personally invited by the Women’s Business Centre of BOC Network to host a workshop on finding a niche in a saturated market. “Saturation doesn’t mean no opportunity. It means the opportunity requires a different lens,” she told attendees.
“The industry talks endlessly about sustainability,” Bharwani says. “I am less interested in the conversation than in the outcome. How many garments did not go to landfill this season? That is what I work toward.”
As a fashion consultant for Empire Apparel LLC, Bharwani has directly assessed, and said she helped redirect more than three million garments over the past two years, inventory that would otherwise have been destroyed. Her work spans Pakistan, Ethiopia, Cambodia, Vietnam, and the United States. In each country, the through-line is the same: technical garment assessment, compliance-forward repositioning, and recalibration for the American off-price market. Vendors she has worked with continue applying her frameworks long after programs end.
For shoppers who find a well-made garment at off-price retail stores like Burlington for fifteen dollars, none of this is visible. They will not see her assessment that determined its viability, the work that cleared it for U.S. retail, or the strategic logic that got it onto a truck rather than into a landfill. But in the American off-price market, her fingerprints are everywhere.
