Sustainability in 2023
Our sustainability journey in 2023: our focus this year is on deepening the collaboration with our production partner Vane Fashion, to help them become a leader in the sustainable fashion industry. They are working on programs to reduce their carbon emissions, remove hazardous chemicals from the supply chain and a program on measuring and improving working conditions in the factory.
Our mission: help them to operate more sustainably, which will also makes the production of our future collections more sustainable!
Looking back on 2022, we're giving ourselves a 7 out of 10 for our efforts to improve our sustainability. We had 3 main focus points and we managed to achieve two of them, namely "bringing back the love into products & packaging" and "first small steps towards circularity". Our communication has not really improved that much, mainly due to capacity issues, so it remains on our to do list and we'll get around to it eventually.
What's next for 2023? We're happy to announce that we've agreed on a long-term partnership with our current factory Vane Fashion from Ningbo, China. We are super happy with how the first production with them came out:
- Delivery on-time, which is quite important.
- Product quality and fit back on a level where we want it. There are of course still small things to improve, but so far no major issues like we had over the last years.
- We made the move into 30% recycled cotton!
As part of our long-term mutual commitment, we've agreed to work with Vane on their sustainability transition. It is their goal to become a leader in the sustainable fashion industry, and we are of course happy to support such green ambitions through our knowhow and network here in Europe.
We feel that on a product level, we've hit the ceiling of what we can achieve in terms of sustainability. Given the current state of technology and our price ranges. So to make real, meaningful progress, we need to look beyond the products at how the actual production takes place and what can be improved there.
Concretely what we'll do the coming months, is work with Vane on a number of programs that are helping the fashion industry to become more sustainable:
- Carbon Leader Program - this is a very detailed action plan that helps Vane to reduce it's carbon emissions, steps can vary from moving to renewable energy to changing energy intensive steps in production.
- ZDHC - Zero Discharge of Hazardous Chemicals. A detailed program that aims to eliminate problematic chemicals from the supply chain (and the products!). For you certification afficianados: it's basically the same as BlueSign or OekoTex or the chemicals part of GOTS.
- HIGG FEM program - we're not yet very familiar with it, but as we understand, it is a reporting tool that helps to measure and communicate progress.
All these programs are already underway and we're going to help Vane move as quickly and smoothly as possible through them. As you'll note, there is no program yet that focusses on social standards, we've identified one that could be an option, but still need to discuss with Vane if they also want to do it. The program seems to have been created with a very western state of mind, so we're not yet sure how applicable it will be in real life.
If we can pick a favorite, it would be the carbon leader program! It is extremely detailed and offers concrete steps to make improvements and directly reduce carbon emissions. As you'll note