I had the chance to speak at the Green Business conference last week in Istanbul about future market scenarios for the fashion industry. The conference is an event of the Sustainability Academy in Turkey.
Key highlights from the event
After having followed Hiut Denim’s newsletter and blog for weeks now I could wait no longer to place the brand in the best practise category.
Hiut Denim is an authentic brand. If it were a person, Hiut would be personable, open, honest, trustworthy, fun: maybe with black and white views and opinions but always in line with its values. Surely, a person deeply bond to its roots.
Despite the increased availability of sustainability communications experts, an organisation like Unilever, highly committed to change consumer behaviour, only last year, declared that “sustainability marketing is our biggest challenge”. What are these hard challenges the Unilevers of this world are talking about?
Does sustainability, or not, impact share price? Does it, or not, make for a profitable bottom line business case? Does it, or not, help increase efficiencies? Here the insights from research, and what they mean.
In Europe, SMEs make up 99% of all companies, and provide 67% of employment a much higher percentage of jobs in developing countries.
Research has shown that they generate around 50% of the private sector’s turn over, and that SMEs contribute at least 80% to the national GDPs.
Yet less than 20% of policies, government investments etc. are made with them in mind.
The world of sustainability in fashion has changed fundamentally in the last few years. In this article we look at qualities that leaders such as Patagonia's Yves Chouinard have, that make them the movers and shakers of the sustainability agenda in the industry at large.
This article has was submitted to and appeared in edited form at the European Business Ethics Network annual conference, Lille...
This current post is looking at supply chain risk in the light of the Europe wide ‘Horse meat’ scandal. It remains to be said that the results found so far not only suggest that undeclared horse meat found its way into cheap and low quality, possibly prepared meals. But that there is a much more general, and widely spread problem with meats of different types ending undeclared on the shelves for consumption.
Recently, my colleague Ilaria Pasquinelli and I had the opportunity to participate in a, generally speaking, consumer facing product showcase and trade show.
For the purpose of this research, we built an interactive task which required the visitors to cut off one of their garment labels (i.e. the washing instructions), and then pin it to a map attached to a cork board according to 2 dimensions:
– ‘Made in‘: Where the garment was manufactured.
– ‘Made from‘: What the primary material the garment was made of.
In the discussions within companies around risk management and indispensable moves towards more sustainable processes and business practises, there’s habitually unmentioned elephant in the room, namely: Where, in all what needs to be done in the corporate world, does the responsibility of the individual factor in?
Supply chain transparency is – as it happens – among the prime concerns of investors when considering their risk. The news is though, that it really isn’t any news at all. Supply chain transparency has been called for for at least a couple of decades – for reasons that are entirely aligned with profitability, customer service, competitive advantage, product quality and so on and so forth.
In 2012, we have seen risk management and sustainability play a more important part in the agendas of leading fashion brands. Nevertheless, many companies still perform poorly at many stages of their supply chain and are unaware of the risks, particularly if they lie beyond their direct operations.
The following are the the main trends we see happening in the near and mid future. A few exist already but will become substantially more pronounced; others are just about to emerge and hit the surface of public awareness.
In the luxury segment, production focuses on highly complex garments and low order volumes that might involve just five pieces per style which makes sourcing very challenging. The approach currently pursued by European high-end apparel brands to address the problem is that of ‘High End Fashion Cluster‘.
“Marketing used to be about creating a myth and telling it. Now it is about finding a truth and sharing it”. Better brands are those brands that will ensure their long-term existence, that will go beyond their founders and their children. How? By taking better decisions and looking at the bigger picture.
Can we say that modern businesses prefer long-term over short-term? For sure the business environment is more and more rewarding companies that think ahead and do not fail to consider existing or potential risks. What has happened in finance is striking and is based on the concept that long-term benefits outweigh the short-term pain.
t is fairly old news, but merits repeating nevertheless: our current economy, at the verge of collapse as it is, is egocentric, and at the same time understates costs while overstating benefits.
In other words, it promotes a type of behaviour that is degeneratively competitive: the ‘me’ wants, needs, more of whatever it may be, while anything and everything else is losing out. No matter how high the cost for the bigger picture – society and the planet, that is – may be.
Scientists, engineers, designers and creators. 3 'species' of people that neither in academia, nor in industry collaborate well. Yet, precisely the fashion and textiles industry is so trans-disciplinary that collaboration is a must.
This is the second post of a two article series. It will look at what we can say about the 'ethics behind a brand' from how they practically do business.
The Founder Syndrome is probably the 2nd most frequent reasons why SMEs fail. The syndrome thereby refers to a steep power hierarchy in a small business, with the founder at its top.
London Fashion Week 02/2011 - Day 2: EstEthica is successful so it seems. But what is there going on behind the scenes? Some controversial and critical insights.
