SQETCH BV

Their core work

SQETCH BV is an Amsterdam-based technology startup that built a digital platform to connect fashion brands with apparel manufacturers, reducing the friction in textile production sourcing. Their platform addresses a core operational problem in the fashion industry: brands struggle to find reliable manufacturing partners, and small factories lack visibility. They participated in the EU TCBL initiative exploring new business models for the textile and clothing sector, which informed their understanding of industry structure and supply chain dynamics. Their work is essentially marketplace design and fashion-tech product development, not traditional research.

What they specialise in

How they've shifted over time

All available H2020 data falls within 2015–2016, making a meaningful multi-year evolution analysis impossible from this dataset alone. In this early period, SQETCH combined participation in a research consortium on textile business models (TCBL) with an EU-funded feasibility study for their own digital product. The absence of later H2020 projects suggests either the company exited EU funding after initial validation, scaled commercially without further public R&D, or did not continue in this direction.

Their trajectory points toward commercial product development in fashion-tech rather than ongoing research participation, suggesting any future collaboration would be more about industry deployment and piloting than joint R&D.

How they like to work

SQETCH has taken both the coordinator role (on their own SME Instrument project) and a partner role (in the large TCBL consortium), showing flexibility depending on context. Their TCBL participation placed them inside a wide European network of 22 partners across 11 countries, which is unusually broad for a two-project SME and reflects TCBL's scale rather than SQETCH's own network-building. As a small startup, they are more likely to contribute as a user, pilot site, or industry-facing partner than as a technical research lead.

SQETCH's network footprint — 22 partners in 11 countries — is almost entirely inherited from their TCBL participation, which was a large multi-country consortium. Their independent networking capacity as a two-person startup is likely much smaller than these numbers suggest.

What sets them apart

SQETCH's differentiation is in their market-facing position: they are a digital intermediary in the fashion supply chain, not a researcher studying it. This makes them a valuable pilot partner or dissemination channel for manufacturing and textile projects that need real industry validation, but they are unlikely to contribute deep technical or scientific expertise to a consortium.

Highlights from their portfolio

• sqetch
  SQETCH coordinated this SME Instrument Phase 1 project, making it the only case where this organization led an EU-funded initiative — a feasibility study for their core product connecting fashion brands with manufacturers.
• TCBL
  The largest and longest project in their portfolio (2015–2019), TCBL was a major EU initiative on transformative business models for the textile sector, giving SQETCH exposure to a pan-European industry reform network.