Transparency is essential when dealing with important issues such as health and safety, decent working conditions and environmental protection throughout the life cycle of our products.
By investing in upgrading our data, using blockchain and designing with 3D technology, we can reduce samples and work with our supply chain partners to create transparency and traceability and help them reduce their climate footprint.
Traceability solutions are needed to make sure that consumers get products they can trust and simultaneously ensure compliance with expected EU requirements for digital product passports.
Getting full traceability and transparency in global apparel and footwear supply chains is, however, a challenge due to the complexities of the different tiers. We've started with our Public Factory Lists, and we focus on industry collaboration to improve our systems for tracking and communicating knowledge and data. To help develop both accurate and useful information we'll be using industry aligned methodologies such as the Sustainable Apparel Coalition’s Higg Product Module.
The technology from BESTSELLER’s Digital Showrooms allows us to adjust collections during a sales period, showing customers the most relevant styles tailored for shoppers in their own market.
In the end, all of this results in a better customer experience and concurrently introducing a more sustainable sales process with fewer style cancellations and a minimum of physical sales samples.
Physical samples are a significant financial and environmental cost for BESTSELLER. Digital showrooms provide commercial advantages while providing a potentially significant reduction for physical samples, as our sales colleagues can present a collection of a limited number of physical samples combined with high resolution images, videos and 3D modelling.
Following on from a close collaboration on several successful pilot projects, BESTSELLER has expanded its partnership with innovator TextileGenesis to trace man-made cellulosic fibres and direct-to-farm cotton throughout BESTSELLER’s supply chain. Specifically, we will in 2022 trace the fibres in approximately 25 million pieces of garments from raw material to end product.
In 2021, VILA created and sold an entire collection digitally – the first time in BESTSELLER this has been achieved without using any physical samples. Since then, they have continued to develop and sell capsule collections based on 3D.
Since the beginning of the industrial revolution, the process to design clothes and accessories in the fashion industry has relied exclusively on physical materials. In BESTSELLER alone our suppliers produce millions of physical samples annually, driving up costs and production time, increasing waste and unnecessary greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions.
Following the digital revolution, the latest 3D technology provides the fashion industry with opportunities to design styles using 3D software to significantly reduce and even eliminate the need for physical samples across the whole industry.
By working together with our supply chain partners to develop 3D style creation we can make the design process much more efficient, reducing design lead-times by up to 50 percent.
This way, we reduce our environmental impact and make our business more agile. By 2025, we have committed to significantly reduce the volume of samples we produce by investing in digital solutions and collaborating closely with our suppliers.
