[Featured images provided by Stahl.]

Hey, and welcome back to The Interline Podcast. 

This is going to be a short intro for me today because this is a longer episode. Not crazily so, don’t worry, I’m not asking you to sit in your car for an hour at the end of your commute. 

There’s actually a running joke here about how long these shows are really supposed to be. And the answer is, I guess, I don’t really know. It’s very much led by the questions and it’s led by how much conversation comes spilling out of the confines you try to script in advance. There’s a sweet spot for these: I think it’s somewhere in the 40-50 minute range. But sometimes the conversation is big enough and the questions are deep enough that you don’t really have any other choice than to let them run over time. Today’s is one of those. 

This isn’t going to be the first time we’ve talked about sustainability on this show. I’ve previously had brand owners and independent experts on to debate the very same thing. But this is the first time we’ve tried to really define and delimit the work that’s been done, the work that’s being done, and the work that’s still to be done. 

To cover all of that, I’m bringing on Gianluca Belotti. He is a business leader at Stahl, which deals in specialty chemistry for coatings. And he’s previously managed Sustainable Innovations and BizDev at luxury groups and alternative material startups, all of which puts him squarely in the “commercialising science” bracket. He’s also an expert evaluator and reviewer for bioeconomy and circular economy projects for the European Commission, which puts him closer to the regulatory bracket as well. 

Gianluca does a lot of thinking about sustainability, so I tried to take full advantage of my opportunity to quiz him by going after some of the biggest questions there are.

So let’s get them underway.

NB. The transcript below has been lightly edited.

Okay, Gianluca Belotti, welcome to The Interline Podcast.

Thank you, Ben.

It’s a pleasure to have you. Now, we always start like this. And I’m kind of asking you two questions in one here because you have a bit of a dual role going at the moment, which is to walk us through what a typical working day looks like for you. 

Now, you’re a leader at Stahl, which is a very on the ground, lab coats, sort of business working in specialty chemistry. And you’re also a circular economy and bioeconomy evaluator and reviewer for the European Commission.

Tell me what that looks like day to day.

Well, actually, that’s easier than it looks. My role is definitely a 100% effort job. As you said, Stahl is a global leader and provider of specialty coatings for flexible materials, which means that we develop chemical formulations that are applied in thin layers on flexible materials. And thanks to this thin layer, the properties of the material change. Both the static – like for example, colour, texture, glossiness – also haptic – like if you want to have a nice velvety touch. 

All those properties are affected by our formulations, but also more practical properties, more mechanical properties, like for example scratch resistance, water resistance, anti-squick properties, flame retardancy, anti-stain properties. Really few microns of our products change the properties of the material. And typically we work on substrates like leather, textile, but also paper packaging, for example. And so there are good chances that you or the people listening to this podcast have been in contact with our products. 

And I’m working in the Open Innovation team in Stahl, and with the specific focus on innovative materials that are marketed as alternatives to leathers. And that’s quite an exciting job as this is a new field of materials that is being developed by startups and sometimes also larger companies. Very challenging because all these materials are trying to bring new properties, improved environmental performance, and doing that from completely new raw materials that are not those commonly used by the industry. 

images provided by stahl.

So you can imagine products coming from fermentation, plant residues like pineapple leaves or cactus leaves. So many different types of substrates that need to be improved with our products. And this is taking all of my time basically. 

But then as an expert evaluator for the European Commission, I took some of my holidays and days off to provide my skills and expertise to the commission that needs external independent evaluators to screen proposals for new fundings, for new projects, and also evaluate that I was going with the projects that have already been funded. And this is also very exciting. Different type of job. 

Very interesting because in that case you have the chance to engage with different fields than what I’m usually doing and also with very international, very collaborative environments.

And where specifically did your interest in sustainability come from? Because I appreciate the grounding in Stahl, that’s gonna come up. I appreciate the grounding in the European Commission work. Tell me where the roots of your sort of passion and investment in sustainability started.

That’s a long time ago, actually. My background is biotechnology and chemical engineering. And since then, I’ve started looking into, honestly, at the beginning, it was innovation. I want to do something new and something that can bring value into the real world.

If you have to design, to imagine a new process, a new material, and you want that to be better than what is already available, then definitely you want to have it as sustainable as possible. So I started actually working in the microalgae sector, but then I moved quickly to biomaterials, circular economy, and from my background comes my expertise into the sustainability sector.

Okay, and I think we’re gonna spend a lot of our time on sustainability today. That’s gonna be the driving force of this. And let’s start with a bit of an assessment baseline grounding sort of thing. 

We’ve been hearing about the size, the urgency, the scale of the mandate for fashion to get better about how it monitors measures and mitigates its environmental impact for years. And at the same time, we’ve also seen basically every objective monitoring and benchmarking exercise return very similar findings, which is that the industry’s making relatively slow progress where it does communicate and where it does disclose around environmental and ethical indicators. 

I think a lot of people in the industry’s orbit, whether they’re consumers or fashion pros who aren’t directly involved in sustainability, don’t have the kind of background or role that you have, they find that gap difficult to understand because there’s clearly been a lot of pressure to change. That pressure comes from regulations, from consumers, from a bunch of areas that we’ll talk about. And we definitely see a lot of brands making commitments to sustainability, but things in general don’t seem to be moving at the pace that the circumstances demand. 

So for anyone who’s not fully up to speed, right now, what do you, in your opinion, think is the delta, the gap, between what fashion needs to do and what it’s currently able to actually prove that it’s doing?

Well, let me start by saying that definitely the fashion sector has a relevant impact on the environment. No doubts. Roughly speaking, 10% of CO2 emissions are coming from the fashion sector, which is also a very intensive user of fresh water. Plus, roughly speaking again, one third of microplastics are coming probably from synthetic fibres used in the fashion sector. And also there is a lot of waste production – garments that are disposed. More than 100 million tons per year. And with very little of this amount which is actually recycled. 

The impact of the fashion sector is relevant on the environment which is not in a great shape right now. I will not get into the details right now but maybe we can talk about it. 

And so definitely the industry realised such impact and started doing different actions, implementing different actions to try to reduce this impact. And I have to say that right now the major brands have ESG targets. So environmental targets that they pose to themselves to be achieved in a certain period of time. And most of the brands are actively respecting regulations and certifications that are not mandatory in terms of sustainability. And plenty of efforts are devoted into the reduction of the environmental impact of the compounds. 

As I said, most of the brands are able to claim remarkable reduction in scope one and two of their production in terms of CO2 emissions. So basically the day process and the energy that they’re using is much more sustainable right now than they were some years ago. On the other hand, however, you’re right. Notwithstanding these efforts, we see constant increase in the impact of the fashion sector as a whole. And the main driver for this impact is the increased demand. Brands are selling more products every year and even if each product takes less resources and generates less waste, overall when you sell more products the sum is positive. 

And this means that the sector right now is as sustainable as it ever has been. But the global trends in consumption basically are nullifying these efforts. And the overall results, the overall balance is that the impact is growing. The environmental impact of the sector is growing.

Mm-hmm.

Okay, do me a favour: define scope 1, 2 and 3 for me. I mean, I’m familiar with them, but just for listeners that may not be. So scope 1, direct, scope 2, I think is kind of direct supplier, scope 3 is what you would class as, like, multi-tier, upstream. Am I on the right track? How’s your definition for that?

No, that’s totally correct. So to put in simple words, the impact of a company, of an industry, is overall evaluated in three different scopes. So let me say in three different layers. The first one is what actually happens in the industry, in the company. Scope two is what is happening in the direct suppliers. So not only what I’m doing, but also since every company takes resources and converts them. So it takes in account the impact, also the direct resources that a company is using. And then tier three is really the beginning of the value chain. So where the raw material is coming from and what is, let me say, most far from what’s happening inside the company itself. 

So let me put it in this way. What is more indirect control of the fashion brands is definitely being improved in terms of resource efficiency and waste production. But the overall value chain is a little bit more complex and difficult to control.

And so as we get far from the industry, the impact is still there. And as I said, the final result is that the overall impact of the industry is growing.

Fine, yeah, so you’ve summarised it well, but I’ll just put a bow around it before we move on – there’s a lot of brands with, as you put it, great intentions, good progress within the first two scopes, within their own operations and within their direct suppliers. Scope three, as I understand it, makes up a lot of the environmental impact of a given product. I don’t know how much in my head. I feel like it’s somewhere in the sort of more than half of the product’s impact is scope three, so material production, harvesting, mill usage, dyeing and so on. And that’s the hardest part to touch because that’s the part that has a lot of different stakeholders, not everybody’s connected, not everybody’s aligned and everything else. 

Then we have the compounding factor that at the same time demand is up or at the very least supply is up. We’ll get to demand I think, like demand and supply. Fashion is doing more volume than it has done before and that the net effect at the end of all of that is that despite individual brand progress, industry progress is not going in the right direction as we would say.

Now, are there any particular product categories or regions or kind of business models that you think stand out there that buck that trend? Anything, any kind of models that are islands of progress or is that picture universal? Because when you frame it as the challenge is in scope three visibility or the challenge is in better aligning demand and supply, it feels like maybe there’s some business models that could do a better job of that than others because they’re just well set up for it.

Yeah, let’s say in terms of business model, we know that the linear and more traditional business model is definitely the one that has a high impact in terms of resource consumption and waste production. Moving towards a more circular business model would definitely help, even if we have seen how difficult every day is. That’s literally part of my job. Every day we are facing difficulties in trying to develop this type of business model. Then you also have other business models that can promote, let me say, the longevity of products like second hand, for example, or reduce the overproduction like production on demand. But still, it’s very difficult to bring them into everyday life because the dynamics of the markets are extremely complex and finding a way to make fitting these models is proving extremely complex. 

In terms of sectors, well, this is hard to say honestly, there are some sectors that have a deep impact on the environment, especially web processing, for example, also shoe manufacturing. It’s difficult to really define what sector is doing better or what sector is doing worse. As I say, that is actually trying to do better and push the boundaries a little bit is represented by all those startups that are developing innovative recycling systems, alternative materials, and really trying to push the boundaries, to connect to what we were saying previously, instead of growing plants on the fields to take the raw fibres, using fermentation, for example, that you can perform on non-fertile lands, on marginal lands, for example, that can definitely reduce the environmental impact of the manufacturing. And again, trying to recycle post-consumer waste, it’s another area that would be great.

Yeah, and it feels as well, so you mentioned the linear model being the one with the largest impact, which is logical, particularly if you scale it, like vertically and laterally, as we talked about with demand. It feels like, yes, circular, yes, alternative fibres and so on, but also the kinds of brands that are promoting more of a slow fashion sort of movement, the kinds of brands that either make-on-demand or something close to it, even if they’re sort of pre-booking a lot of materials and capacity and what have you, it feels like the companies that have a slightly different relationship with the consumer where they say that they’re not going for growth, they’re not going for scale, that’s not the cornerstone of their model. Their model is getting products to people that they actually want that they will keep that have long-term value and that are not made in huge quantities to expected demand but are made to actual demand. Those feel like models that are a better fit as well.

Definitely. I would say that, yep, it’s hard to find a company that is not putting growth as a cornerstone of that model. But it’s also true that growth can be pushed in different ways. And so, for example, to release a new collection every three months. It’s definitely better than having a fast spectrum, for example.

So if we think about a mid-sized brand, right? So, not a tiny single category sort of company that would only have one material input. Not a company that just does merino wool, for instance, but also not a gigantic multinational who has a huge, huge globe-spanning supply chain, rather just a typical mid-size company – one that originally meant very well, and set some targets for environmental impact reduction. And that company hasn’t been able to make the sort of progress that it would have wanted to in scope three. So let’s say, like we said, on average, scope one and scope two, there are a lot of companies that are able to meaningfully advance their impact reduction strategies there. Scope three, what’s most likely to have happened there in your experience?

What share of those kinds of companies do you think were making commitments before they really knew the reality? A bit of sort of ‘fake it until you make it’ and just hoping that they’d be able to connect the back end dots and really get that scope three visibility in time for people coming around to scrutinise them. And then what share of those sorts of companies actually really invested on walking down the road to understanding and mitigating and managing their scope three emissions, and then had to turn back?

I think the picture here is more complicated than people suspect because there are a lot of companies who wanted to do this and found that they couldn’t because they didn’t have the multi-tier visibility for whatever reason. And then there were companies that thought, surely I can figure this out. If I can figure out my own emissions and my direct suppliers’ emissions and so on, surely I can get my suppliers’ suppliers and my suppliers’ suppliers’ suppliers. In your experience, what’s the balance between those two? And where has it gone wrong?

Well, definitely, I think many companies commit to targets without clearly realising the implications. If I’m not wrong, I would say that more than half of the targets set by companies in terms of ESG are not actually achieved or going to be achieved. So definitely the gap is quite noticeable. Why that happens? As you said, mostly because we are talking of scope 3. So mid-sized companies or even small-sized companies have limited power over suppliers to change the supply chain actually, so to change the materials that the supply chain is providing. Then, even in the case of larger companies or more medium companies putting together efforts and asking changes through the supply chain, then, in some cases, it’s still quite difficult to implement these changes because of technical difficulties in some cases, which are definitely there, but also because of the effects then on the final product, which means that having more sustainable raw materials has an impact on price, and sometimes also on performance and properties of the final products. 

So when you put everything together, dynamics of extremely complex and globalised supply chains, the technical difficulties in changing the way in which raw materials are obtained, and also the impact that those changes might have on the business and on the product, you put all together and you realise how complex it is really to bring a systemic change, something that can really have an impact, not just a small capsule collection made for marketing reasons or just to prove that it’s possible to do that, but make it possible and then make it the standard or at least really present on the market is a completely different type of job.

Yeah, and the thing that you mentioned, if half of targets or thereabouts are not met and are unrealistic to meet, that’s a complicating factor that comes from a lot of that complexity you talked about. 

The other complicating factor is there’s a perennial question that dogs sustainable fashion, which is do people, buyers, consumers actually want it? So I’ve been in closed door discussions before where senior folks and major brands have basically or openly said that they keep their sustainability initiatives going as a branding exercise, but the consumer spending commitments just aren’t there at the scale that would make it worthwhile if there was no reputational benefit. Or they put effort into sustainability mainly because it makes them look good and feel good, but it actually does nothing for the bottom line. 

And that also to me feels a bit like the same pattern we see with ultrafast fashion. You know, it’s easy to say, okay, people buy cheap goods because they have low spending power at the moment and true in some cases not universal, but you still end up at the same place which is people keep buying a bad thing, clothing that is made in high volume, that is designed to be disposable, does not use preferred materials and so on. Someone’s going to keep making it. And I’ve said this before.

And it’s that if you look at regulators in the EU and France in particular, they’re stepping in to try and rein in fast fashion companies as a way to protect their domestic brands, as a way to kind of rein in a business model and maybe some import loopholes and things. But I also see that they’re trying to rein in people’s behaviours and desires. They’re trying to rein in not just the supply to our earlier part, but the demand and where the demand comes from. And I don’t feel like you can regulate that demand away. 

So if we think exclusively about new product market rather than circular and secondary, do people actually care? Do end consumers really want sustainable fashion? Is that demand for volume always going to remain? Because it just seems like environmental and humanitarian credentials are really low on the priority list when it comes to people making purchasing decisions. But maybe I’m missing something.

That’s really the question. And probably this is the most fascinating question in my opinion. Here we are getting into consumer psychology and neurobrain physiology. It’s really interesting digging into what people want. And then also if there is a gap between what they say they want and what they actually do. So here the question is quite complex. I’m not really an expert in this field, but definitely we can see that there is, if we ask any consumer, would you prefer a sustainable product over a conventional one? The answer is yes, of course. Would you pay more for that? Yes, of course. But then when we see actual sales performance from brands, that’s not what is really happening. 

This is a little bit like based on how people take their decision from where the market demand is coming from. Well, if we go looking into a little bit, again, consumer psychology, we can say that people brains, we have two systems. One is more ancient that takes immediate decisions based on surrounding input. And then we have another system, much slower, that elaborates the input and instead of providing immediate feedback, provides a reason. And so basically, what happens is the first system, the more ancient one, takes the purchasing decision and then in a matter of a fraction of seconds, we do not even realise why when we enter into the shop, we see something and we like it and we want to buy it. And then the second system elaborates justifications, rational justifications, why we are purchasing something over something else. It’s extremely complex to understand where the market demand is coming from and if we can really push sustainability as a driver, if sustainability can be considered a driver of purchasing for certain customers.

Yeah, I think as long as we have those kind of lizard brains, I think people have called them before, your immediate kind of limbic stuff, someone is going to cater to people’s immediate desires. In a capitalist system, that’s always going to happen. There’s always going to be a company that does that. And I think that’s where external regulation becomes the next lever, right? Because the market is not going to regulate that demand away because somebody will cater to it and it’s going to persist. 

So, let’s try and talk about regulations directly. Now, I am also definitely not an expert in this area, but it seems to me as though the regulatory frameworks, the legislative frameworks are changing all the time, at least changing significantly between the initial period of proposal and the period of adoption and implementation. I can think of the US as most probably the most potent example of what it looks like when a government kind of decides to shirk that responsibility and say we’re not going to regulate environmental harm in the same way under the current administration. But even here in the EU, you have companies who spend years preparing themselves to meet targets and transparency requirements that seem to have been softened to a greater or lesser extent between being proposed and being implemented. 

If the industry is not going to self-regulate and consumers are not voluntarily going to decide or be able to decide to buy more sustainably on aggregate, regulation feels like the only big lever that’s left to pull. Are the people in power actually serious about pulling it? Is regulation coming in a punitive, restrictive form or is this the kind of thing that’s a spectre, it’s out there to encourage people to change, but it’s just always going to remain a couple of years off forever? 

Well, let me say that companies are taking actions in terms of voluntary protocols and standards to try, as we were saying before, to reduce as much as possible the environmental impact. Having said that, this cannot be considered the standard all across the industry.

And clearly that’s probably not enough, especially not enough to bring most of the players, most of the industries up to a good level in terms of environmental performance. Regulations, national regulation, international regulations are definitely needed to raise the minimum bar for all the industry in terms of environmental performance. 

And I have to say that Europe is quite active and pushing many regulations, especially recently, in the more recent years, to reduce the environmental impact of many sectors, including the fashion sector. For example, we definitely have the eco design for sustainable products regulations that is going to enter into force this year that will lead to the destruction ban. So unsold products cannot be destroyed anymore from brands. This is quite important also to what you saying before. Digital product passport is another initiative and new disclosure rules, so standardised ways of disclosing the impact that companies are having on the environment. But we also add green claims and consumer directives to try to limit greenwashing and provide consumer information for the purchasing decision. But as with framework directive, there are many regulations. 

Clearly, regulations are always lagging behind. This is my definition. Because something happens and in response, regulators develop new regulations. And definitely, there are many interests and pressure on regulators. It’s a balance between what should be done and what is possible to be done. Possible not in terms of technical possibilities, but what actually the industry can realistically implement.

Yeah, and that to me is the key with a lot of this. I’ve gone back and forth on whether regulation should feel like an impossible target because it encourages, it impresses upon companies the scale of the challenge, right? That would be one definition. The other would be, well, does that actually just disincentivise them to do anything about it? If compliance feels like something that’s unachievable, if the delta is too big between what you know now and what you need to know and disclose in the future, that leads to inaction. 

And I think there’s a bunch of companies who are wrestling with that, and I’ll say companies like the brand level in particular, and the retail level, because they’ve invested a lot in technology and systems and processes designed to try and close the gap between something that feels very big and very unmanageable and make it manageable to them. And then the regulations sort of shift, and the regulations become more manageable over time. 

And I know from speaking to a few brands that there are people who feel like they’ve sunk a lot of cost into getting ready for something, getting ahead of the curve, only to find that the curve is getting warped back because the industry at large, the mass market, isn’t going to be able to comply. And I think there are some people who are mad about that. There are some people who have spent a good amount of money on software, hardware, and process and innovation to meet a target only to realise that that target is going to get softened over time. What advice would you give to companies like that? Companies that feel like they spent a lot of time and money getting ahead of the curve and now it feels like the curve isn’t going to catch up but the curve is actually being softened and smoothed out. How should they feel about that sort of investment? 

I mean I could imagine myself feeling good about it and saying well I invested for the right reasons and actually I’m still ahead of the market because I’m now ready to comply when regulations do become tighter in the future. Or I can see myself being cross about it and saying I’ve sunk a lot of cost into a level of disclosure that felt unrealistic and I’ve made it realistic but actually that disclosure requirement has changed. I’ve been softened over time. What would your advice be to companies like that?

Definitely I think that complying with regulations, most of the time – again, it depends a little bit on what type of regulations, but even if the regulations will be sucked in and you will find you are way ahead of the curve, as you said, that becomes your competitive advantage. So you have the possibility to distinguish from others being on top. 

And this is the reason why this type of investment should not be done for just complying, for ticking the box with the new regulations, but they should be integrated into the company vision, the company strategy. Once you make them part of your strategy, part of your business, it’s not just being compliant with something that you have to do, but it’s part of your business. Your business works because you are ahead of the curve, because you are doing things differently. Then actually that’s not a problem for you. Actually, probably it’s beneficial for you because that means that those companies that are just ticking the box will lower their bar, and then you will stand out even more in the competitive landscape.

Yeah, that’s a really good way to frame it. I think that that’s encouraging and I like it. 

I want to get your perspective on the material side of things because you talked earlier about alternative fibres, biomaterials, renewable inputs and so on. That feels like a really promising area. You’ve mentioned it a few times from that point of view, but it also feels like an area that struggled a little bit. And there’s quite a few examples of the industry making what seem on the surface like big bets on fibre or finishing innovation only for deeper commitments not to materialise and for those innovations to get stuck or to stall at the point of industrialisation or deeper commercialisation. 

I know it’s not very up to the minute to talk about Renewcell, but it’s the story that contains a lot of the key ingredients. A ton of publicity, investment from a lot of different sources, including major brand groups, big efforts to scale, and then the order volume fails to materialise and the whole thing falls apart. 

You can argue that RenewCell was a bad product or a faulty concept in terms of where it was located, but it’s not an isolated incident. There’s a bunch of cases where either the capital backing for scaling alternative materials doesn’t appear, the science proves to be difficult to scale, it doesn’t come down and cost fast enough, and the industry uptake outside of, you mentioned it before, isolated standalone collections and things doesn’t follow. I’m sympathetic to both sides on this one, right?

So material and process innovators have to have some runway to develop, refine, industrialise, and then drive down barriers and prices over time. But brands who are sourcing materials for, as you put it earlier, an ever increasing number of collections and to meet demand, they also need feature parity at the material level. They need reliability. They need a drop in industrialisation. There’s a lot of tension in between good science, good vision and broad market adoption and there’s a non-virtuous cycle that seems to be repeating itself in alternative fibres. 

What conditions do you think need to change for alternative and preferred materials to have a fighting chance?

Good point. Apparently we have seen it more than once recently. It’s a combination of factors. From one side, innovators should start designing their technologies, their ideas, their value propositions differently. When I say differently, it means that all the aspects that are required at full scale to make a viable solution should be included in the designing phase from the very beginning. For example, it cannot be from a price point of view. Yep, currently our technology is more expensive because we are at small scale, but when we will be full scale it will be more convenient. Maybe this is not something that necessarily happens if you do not already expect how a full scale solution will be manufactured. And you already have projections that with that manufacturing system, you will be achieving a certain price position. 

And that applies to everything: material supplies, logistics, integration with the rest of the value chain. It’s very complex because that type of design requires an amount of knowledge, which is massive. Brands and companies that will be using new materials and new fibres, new solutions in general, have to be involved in the designing phase at this stage to validate the design. Not really elaborating the design, but in validating those designs. And also the suppliers and the suppliers of the suppliers and so on and so forth through all the value chain to make sure that all aspects are taken into consideration. Otherwise, you will build a manufacturing plant that will have no demand or maybe not enough raw materials or will produce products too expensive. 

So I would say that it’s really in the connection with the all the value chain, taking into consideration all the value chain during the design phase. It’s really important.

Yeah. And that seems like the same question that dogs kind of on demand production and nearshoring and things like that as well, is any alternative model, any alternative input, any alternative output requires that advanced consideration. You can’t just take the existing unit economic mass volume offshore production model and then just instantly switch out for something else without factoring in how it’s going to change the way the industry operates from the design phase onwards.

I want to end us on a bit of a mixed note with two questions and here’s the first one. So, what are some upwards positive indicators that people should be paying attention to that either show that fashion companies are understanding and underlining the urgency for action and making or some evidence that people are making tangible progress. What are some good indicators we can point to here?

Well, as we were saying before, the industry is definitely making progress and, today, products are the most sustainable that we have been capable of producing since the second industrial revolution, probably. In general, I would say that for customers looking for good signs and good companies, good products are when they find – in addition to all the numbers that are disclosed by companies – repair programmes in place, if they can see clear reports and numbers published by the companies. And also if the business model is not pushing, as we said, new collections every two months. All these are good signs that the company is really doing seriously their commitment for sustainability.

Okay, and then the second question is: we spent a lot of time talking about the environmental crisis from the point of view of it feeling like something that’s terrifying and feeling like something that is coming, is inevitable, is a giant wave, is going to change everything. And that also makes it feel too big to actually really reconcile, too big to get your head around.

I think some of our listeners are already going to be familiar with the idea that when that happens, if we reach a climate crisis point, that your preferred material inputs might be harder or more expensive to source and maybe your manufacturing bases could be choked or disappear due to drought or heat or flooding or sea level rises. But I feel like there’s something else more tangible we can get to here. 

What do you think is a realistic near-term negative outcome that we can end on that will renew the idea that any brands listening to this who maybe have drifted away from thinking about managing their scope three emissions or maybe drifted away from thinking about how to manage demand or so on, something that will impress upon them that there’s still a requirement to take action. Even if the regulations don’t force it, even if it’s not mandatory, the people who have that competitive advantage, that they’re able to avoid a crisis that the rest of the industry might not be able to avoid.

That’s a very complex question. The environmental situation, most of the environmental indicators are negative. We know that. I think companies are well aware of that. Everybody is well aware of that. And that’s the reason why it’s difficult to give you an answer. 

We are actually into a crisis from an environmental point of view. The point is, it’s not the crisis that people imagine. When you say environmental crisis, people think of ocean rising and some other extreme and atmospheric events. But that’s not how it happens. It’s slower and it’s less visible. And that makes it extremely complex to convince that it’s urgent, but urgent to the point that we are already on delay. 

So actually, I think it’s not providing more catastrophic visions that people will not experience every day. But I think that to promote the change, it would be better to focus on what are the gains, what are the benefits in having more sustainable production, using less resources, and limiting emissions. I think that there are many benefits in doing all these things, and people can see the benefits faster and more directly, in a more tangible way than saying, I don’t know, we did this. Some environmental performance indicators are getting worse and worse every year.

I think that’s a good place to bring us to a close. And I think, you know, the companies that have invested to be ahead of this, the companies that are engaging with it, let’s put it that way, right? The companies that are taking these questions head on as opposed to trying to avoid them, are the companies that will start to see those benefits. However you measure them, whether you’re measuring them in being ahead of the curve, whether you’re measuring them in having a competitive advantage, whether you’re measuring them in risk mitigation or business continuity or product quality or what have you, it’s not a subject that you can refuse to engage with. I guess it’s probably the way I would put it.

Definitely. Reality at the end, always knocks at your door.

That’s a good one. Yep. That’s a good one to bring us to a close. 

Gianluca, thank you so much for your time. This was a good one. I think there’s a lot for the audience to think about here.

Thank you, Ben. It has been a pleasure.

And that’s the end of my conversation with Gianluca.

Reality knocking at your door is a strong image for sustainability in general, I think, and it’s one I’m going to carry with me after this. 

As always, we’re going to be covering something different next week with a fresh industry expert. We’re also aiming, I think, to do a dedicated episode focused on listener questions pretty soon. So thank you to all the people who sent in thoughts and ideas. Originally, I’d planned to try and insert those ideas into upcoming interview-based shows and do them one at a time. But now I reckon the best bet is going to be to bring them all together and have one week be a dedicated kind of mailbag sort of show. And I’ll let you know when we have that one scheduled. 

For now, thanks for listening. I’m going to talk to you again soon.

Ben is a senior fashion technology storyteller, analyst, and moderator with more than a decade's experience in retail.