🚀🌏🌱Sustainability best practices: transparency, ethics, how far can we go?
June, 29th 2021- Fab Fashion Beauty Tech Paris. A post curated by Fabienne Sebahoun.
“Sustainability, transparency are very hot topics nowadays. All brands work on being more and more transparent, like Everlane in fashion or Dieux skin in skincare. They share about their formulas, their efficacy tests, their costs. The downside is that no one is perfect. Being sustainable is a process and a learning curve. The reality is that Everlane has been publicly criticized about social diversity. Therefore, we asked our panelists; how far can we go on this topic?” Fabienne Sebahoun
The advice founders to founders and quotes from our guest Speakers :
Gabriela Salord co-founder of Rowse a line of skincare that is made from clean and effective plant-based ingredients,
Maxime Delavallee co-founder of CrushON the professional vintage fashion marketplace,
Estefania Larranaga founder of Place2Swap, a circular economy integrated platform,
and Marie-Capucine Lemétais, our moderator, VC at Ring Capital, an investment company that finances tech entrepreneurs.
This Webinar was hosted by Isabelle Rabier founder of Jolimoi, the first social-selling platform for beauty brands and Fabienne Sebaoun founder of The French Lab.
🗣 THE ADVICES FROM FOUNDERS TO FOUNDERS
- 💥🗓 Maxime Delavallee: focus on metrics!
It is important to us to communicate publicly on how we work on our positive impact by selling already produced clothes, but also on our negative impact.
“Last year we published a public impact report with Ademe. We use 5k to 10k liters of water to make a pair of jeans. In 2020, we saved 47 million liters of water which represents, 680000 showers. At our scale, water is the most important metrics, we also measure the quantity of raw materials and CO2 equivalence that we save every day.”
🌏🌱Gabriela Salord on defining what sustainability means to her and how she applies it to her business:
“Sustainability is such a huge topic and there is no official definition. For us, within the product strategy, our objective is to find ingredients that are versatile for face, body and hair. Our main focus is: how can we do something that is good for the planet and the skin? And it all starts with ingredients. We source our ingredients to local farmers that are only doing organic farming.
When I was asking the labs if I could reach out to theses farmers, they were very reluctant. So we did it the other way, we were looking for farmers, and we tested their ingredients to incorporate them to the formulas.
“We want all to be transparent, but not everyone is available to give you the info you are asking. It’s time for a change.”
“Changing a plastic lid to wood for instance, at the volume of what we are buying would add 1 to 2$ extra cost to each product.
For us sustainability is a balance of everything you can do at your scale and it is a constant improvement.”
⚡️🚀📈🛍 Estefania Larranaga : a roadmap is key!
“Circular economy starts with sourcing raw materials and finishes with integrating the second life of the product. Brands need to write a roadmap and depending on their strategies and their finances, they can go step by step through each milestone.
The question is not “do I have to go (towards sustainability and circularity)but how”.
We see it as a magic cube with 4 sides. Buyer, seller, consumer and brands: the solution is a business model that is good for each party.”
🌏🌱📊Estefania Larranaga : on the main challenges, impact & growth.
“If you take the example of a cloud provider. You will choose the one that is closest to you. But we need a strong cloud to support our solution, and the closest one might not be the best one. Sometimes because of technology we cannot be as sustainable as we would like to be.”
✏️🔖Maxime Delavallee : on certifications.
“Try to challenge yourself as a manager. Which metrics are important to monitor, then manage the improvements.
Big to small players have great tools. In France we have Zei, as well as B Corp. Improve your internal processes and push your results.”
📝👍Gabriela Salord: about making choices:
“When you run a business it has to be profitable, so you need to make choices.”
🤝 Marie-Capucines Lemétais: how do VCs work with their founders?
It’s a long term relationship, and VCs add skills not only money to the table.
“We need to be very aligned with the founders we are supporting. Growth and impact are key, you want them to be perfectly aligned.
Sometimes we need to give a more sustainable tech orientation to our founders, a strategic angle to establish a strategic roadmap for social and environment. We set the objectives, at the beginning.”
🔥🔥🔥 Final quotes
“What we are most proud of by far is having our consumers tell us that they have been inspired to make conscious changes in their lifestyle thanks to ROWSE. Keep fighting and eventually people will come around.” Gabriela Salord
“The question of both transparency and sustainability is major in many industries including fashion and beauty since it will drive the capacity to create value in the long run for ALL the stakeholders. But saying that is not enough. What we need to discuss is how it becomes one of the key drivers for business, people and strategic decisions.” Marie-Capucine Lemétais
“Write your roadmap, follow your objectives. We won’t be perfect but if we all do our parts, it will be much better.” Estefania Larranaga
“It is time for big players to accelerate. There are great perspectives for the industry.” Maxime Delavallee
MEET THE FOUNDERS and Funders/ VCs. Their Bios.
Marie-Capucine Lemétais is Partner at Ring, an investment company dedicated to tech entrepreneurs willing to build a better tomorrow through sustainable tech. She participated to the creation of the company and the first fundraising in 2017. Prior to that she has worked for 10 years on the digitalization of retail banking, as a consultant, a marketing manager and then a CMO in european online banks and fintechs. Marie-Capucine is 35, she is married and has 2 kids of 4 and 1. She graduated from HEC in 2009.
- Gabriela Salord is the co-founder and CEO of ROWSE, a line of skincare made from clean and effective plant- based ingredients. Prior to ROWSE, she was the CMO at Eutopia, a Paris-based venture capital firm that invests in consumer startups; managed PR at BlaBlaCar; headed marketing at Jumia, one of Rocket Internet’s e-commerce startups; and worked as a brand consultant at M&C Saatchi. She graduated from ESCP Europe and is fluent in four languages.
- Maxime Delavallee is the founder of CrushON. Committed to making sustainable textile consumption the norm, CrushON democratizes circular fashion by connecting professional second-hand fashion trend-setters with consumers all over the world. Today, CrushON gathers 1000+ online shops and 50 000 active users per month. After his bachelor in Canada and during his studies at Sciences Po — HSG, Maxime Delavallée cofounded CrushON in 2018 with Ilhem Jaï and Camille Greco. Before developping CrushON, Maxime has worked at Swaven, a big data startup based in Paris, at Celltrion, a listed biotech corporation based in South Korea, and at the World Bank as a fiscal policy consultant. Since 2021, Maxime is teaching growth and digital marketing strategy at ESSEC Business School.
- Estefania Larranaga is the founder of Place2swap. She lives in France. Retail & sustainability expert and having worked in luxury, fashion and beauty secteurs, she co-founded Place2swap. Her mission as a CEO is to drive brands’ towards circularity in order to satisfy new consumption patterns and reduce the environmental impact of consumption.
Thank you to all our incredible panelists, modertaor and speakers. Join the conversation, receive our Free quarterly newsletter with the replays of webinars and takeaway from our conversations in the 15 chapters worldwide♻️💙✨. 👉https://www.beautytechcommunity.com/
and join the Linkedin global group. We are 7000+ founders in America, Europe, and Asia. We are Fab. Fashion and Beautytech community. We are a movement. We are purpose and data-driven founders. We are FaB!
Thank you Isabelle Rabier for co-leading with me (Fabienne Sebahoun) in Paris, and Odile Roujol in California (LA and SF), the community and the French chapter 👏👏👏. Talk to you soon!
