Bottega Veneta tops the leaderboard for sustainability with lifetime warranties and durable designs

This Vogue Business Index article is part of our Advanced Membership package. To enjoy unlimited access to The Long View from Vogue Business and bi-monthly Market Insights Reports and webinars, sign up for Advanced Membership here. This is one of the five chapters comprising the Vogue Business Index: Winter 2022/23 edition and should be read in conjunction with the others. Please use the table of contents below to navigate between the chapters of the Vogue Business Index: Winter 2022/23 edition. Key takeaways: Don’t leave it too late: Extreme weather events are highlighting the fragility of some fashion supply chains, for example, floods in Pakistan have severely impacted cotton production. Brands not investing in alternative materials, circularity or innovations such as regenerative practices are risking significant disruption to their supply chains in the near future. Upset with offsets: A rush of brands aiming to meet Science Based Targets that line up with a 1.5°C world have accepted that reducing emissions is more important than offsets. There is a clear chance for a major luxury brand to make a statement and become the first to direct all of its offsetting budget to minimising the environmental impact of its own supply chain. Pressure from all sides: Fashion weeks and technology startups have shown they are willing to exclude brands that do not meet their standards on animal welfare. Meanwhile, policymakers are casting doubt on some of the data brands use for green claims. There may soon be no escape for any fashion brands ignoring calls to become more sustainable. Materials in a supply chain crisis Bottega Veneta has leapt above its peers to become the highest-scoring brand in the Index’s sustainability pillar for the first time. Parent company Kering now stewards four of the five brands performing the strongest on the sustainability metrics tracked, including previous number one Gucci. Among the changes that helped Bottega Veneta stand out was a pledge to lengthen the life of handbags with a lifetime warranty and lasting design, with the brand reassessing its production process to place more of a focus on durability, craftsmanship and creativity. Experimentation with materials was a key factor in how scores shifted over the past six months. The share of brands committed to creating products out of recycled fabrics (not just plastic bottles) increased from 46 per cent to 69 per cent. A rise was also seen in the share of brands using organic or regeneratively grown fibres, from 71 per cent to 82 per cent. (This rise can be attributed in part to applying points for company-level initiatives to the individual scores of brands. For example, a Kering-wide project is now more likely to result in additional points for Gucci, Saint Laurent and other brands on the roster.) Extreme weather conditions seen last year highlighted the risks that now exist for fashion’s supply chain. In particular, the flooding in Pakistan caused a 40 per cent drop in the country’s cotton crop as a result of the floods, according to the country’s government figures. This compounds the already difficult conditions faced by the industry following delayed or cancelled payments by global buyers during the pandemic. These shortages could exacerbate an already-growing dependence on polyester, with new polyester production continuing to increase as the market share of recycled polyester remained static. Some industry stakeholders are working to force brands to effect change faster, particularly when it comes to products sourced from animals. Copenhagen Fashion Week banned fur this year, despite Denmark’s historical role as a key exporter of the material, while materials startup Bolt Threads has said preferential access to its mushroom-based leather-alternative Mylo will be given to brands pledging to phase out virgin leather. Fendi is one brand that refuses to give up fur, with CEO Serge Brunschwig presenting the choice between real and artificial fur as one for customers to make, given the material’s heritage. The brand is still researching and developing lab-grown fur fibres using keratin in an effort to retain consumers who do not want fur. What does this mean for workers? Luxury consumers care just as deeply that workers are treated well and paid fairly as they do about any other sustainability issue: 65 per cent say that it is important high-end brands pay workers a living wage, which is just slightly more than those who say that a fashion house’s environmental efforts factor into their purchasing decisions (64 per cent). Given the resonance of these issues, luxury brands could benefit from being more vocal about this subject, given workers’ rights, retention and pay were such defining issues in 2022. Labour shortages have been a significant problem in countries including the UK and the US, with even LVMH reporting a record number of vacancies last year, including specialised roles such as jewellers and watchmakers. Luxury brands are not performing well on this issue. Just 13 per cent of brands have a policy in place that ensures workers in their supply chain are paid a living wage (57 per cent publicly require suppliers to pay the national minimum wage in any given country). Failing to implement safeguards to ensure that workers are paid a reasonable wage is risky, given the high levels of inflation and increase in the cost of living affecting many countries at present. Government regulation continues to loom large in these discussions: from the Fabric Act in the US seeking to protect garment workers’ wages and bring manufacturing back within the country to new due diligence rules currently being worked out in the EU. Only four brands score highly across all of the worker’s rights issues tracked: Burberry, Mulberry, Moncler and Hugo Boss. The two British brands are committed to paying a living wage in the UK, with Burberry recently opting to raise its pay rates early to help staff with the cost of living crisis. Circular models looking ever wiser Given the challenges supply chains face, circular business models, such as resale, repair and recycling, are imperative. Mulberry, winner of British luxury industry body Walpole’s sustainable brand of the year, has moved quickly up the rankings since spring due to its commitment to more sustainable practices. The brand has a buyback programme, directly operates its own resale and repairs over 10,000 bags per year. Nearly half (45 per cent) of brands are also now judged to be diversifying their revenue streams in ways that could enable them to decrease the sale of new products, up from 38 per cent last spring. Coach, Jimmy Choo and Tommy Hilfiger, for example, are all much more engaged in the resale market than they were before. Several recent launches aimed at tackling fashion’s waste issues have demonstrated the repositioning of circularity and heritage as exclusive and desirable. Marni sold a curated selection of historic pieces ahead of its New York Fashion Week show. Longchamp launched its Le Pliage Re-Play bag collection, with each item constructed using end-of-roll materials. And LVMH is now selling heritage products through new archive platform Heristoria.com. Less progress has been made on another circularity pillar, repair, which the Vogue Business Index is now taking a tougher line on. Fourteen brands have had their score reduced in this edition for only offering warranties rather than explicitly offering repairs. Some tech companies also have eyes on this issue, with Farfetch among the investors in clothing repairs platform Save Your Wardrobe’s latest $3 million seed round. VF Corporation, parent company of Supreme, recently became a member of the Ellen MacArthur Foundation network, which is pushing for an advance towards a more circular economy. Just under a fifth (17 per cent) of brands within the Index are members currently. Fashion feels the push to do better on offsets As with many other major industries, a sizable portion of luxury fashion brands use carbon offsets as one way of neutralising the impact they have on the world. However, many critics say it isn’t the answer — Greenpeace describes offsets as the “most popular and sophisticated form of greenwash around”. Essentially, not all carbon removal schemes are made equal, their efficacy is sometimes unproven, and the timespan needed to compensate for the carbon emitted does little to negate the very immediate crisis (sometimes this can be decades in the case of reforestation) or the continued growth of brands’ own carbon footprint. The latest edition of the Index has found that 28 per cent of brands now publicly recognise that reducing emissions is necessary rather than only investing in offsets. As a part of signing up to the Science Based Targets initiative (SBTi), brands must commit to making a minimum amount of reduction to their emissions and prove they will not rely on offsets to meet their targets. Burberry became the first luxury fashion brand to have its net-zero emissions targets approved by the initiative. This is a level above what any other brand has committed to with SBTi and could offer a new benchmark for brands to aspire to when setting climate goals, however, the most important metric will be how well they succeed in achieving their target. So far, Ganni has gone further than most other brands in disavowing offsets, publicly redirecting all of its offsetting funds to investment in making carbon emissions reductions along its own supply chain (sometimes called “carbon insetting”). Meanwhile, many in the industry are watching closely how the EU handles the development of rules regulating green claims and carbon removal. A more aggressive line is also being taken on some of the data being cited by brands to demonstrate progress. The Norwegian Consumer Authority made waves by concluding that brands making green claims based on data from The Higg Materials Sustainability Index (Higg MSI), fashion’s leading environmental assessment tool, can “easily be considered misleading”. In response, campaigners have called for fashion brands to invest more heavily in standardising data collection and expanding its scope to cover more of fashion’s full lifecycle impacts. Amina Razvi, CEO of the Sustainable Apparel Coalition, which developed the Higg MSI, similarly put the onus on the industry to improve its data in a recent interview with Vogue Business. Case study: Bottega Veneta takes the lead on sustainability An increasingly ambitious commitment to making long-lasting products is behind Bottega Veneta’s new position as the highest scorer on the sustainability pillar in this edition of the Index. The brand recently announced plans for a lifetime warranty on products while ensuring that stock lives beyond its seasonal release with a new archive platform called Bottega Series. Since last year, Bottega has had a unique internal app that means sustainability information is easily accessible for employees across the organisations making product decisions. This helps the business to continue making decisions that align with parent company Kering’s 2025 sustainability goals. Communication of these efforts is key to helping inform consumer perception. Bottega is perceived to be about as sustainable as the average luxury brand by high-end consumers worldwide, but this means it is a long way, in consumers’ eyes, behind brands including Stella McCartney, Hermès and Louis Vuitton. If the public recognised how much more Kering is (publicly) doing than most other fashion companies, then its brands — Bottega and Gucci — would be even further ahead at the top of these rankings. Considerably more space on brands’ websites or a more inventive approach could be taken to make strategies and action clearer. Fifty-five per cent of luxury consumers say that they find out information about brands, including their sustainability policies, via their website, making it the most popular channel for people to research brands (over social media or email, for instance). A well-written magazine or newspaper article might also go very far given a similarly sized share (54 per cent) do their research via legacy media platforms. To receive the Vogue Business newsletter, sign up here. Comments, questions or feedback? Email us at feedback@voguebusiness.com. You can learn more about the Vogue Business Index and Advanced Membership here.

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