Luxury and Sustainable
It is no longer only the pressure from media and NGO’s shareholders on the luxury companies, to adhere to the sustainability, that increases nowadays (Kapferer, 2010), but also the number of ethical consumers (Mauer, 2014). Regardless of the type of luxury industry in question, today, more than ever before, respect for sustainable development has a significant role to play in consumers’ purchasing behavior (Lochard, 2011). Due to the urgent need to tackle climate change as well as social and environmental issues, consumers are now concerned about sustainability and want to be informed about the products and services they are thinking of purchasing; they prefer product knowledge over logos, and search for brands with which they could identify themselves, and the purchase of which would bring them, above all, emotional satisfaction (Mauer, 2014). For luxury to be sustainable multiple things would have to change and taken into consideration such as: Do our consumer care, and even if they don’t care do we care? What will be the cost? It is all nice and dandy to intent to be sustainable but one should be able to still benefit from it otherwise what is the point? On a more ethical note, what can be done? Can we do something? And if so, who should act? Should we have a part of responsibility as consumers?
The relationship between luxury and sustainability is, hence, no longer a one-way relationship, but rather, an interdependent relationship in which one player cannot exists without the other. As revealed by one of the recent studies of McKinsey, top managers all over the world no longer need to be pushed into the adoption of more
responsible attitude towards sustainability. Hoping that embracing sustainability would help them preserve their brand image and reputation and perhaps even create extra value and gain competitive advantage over other brands,
they are now, more than ever before, eager to integrate sustainability into their company’s Corporate Strategy (CS) and make it one of their top priorities; and whether to be, or not to be, sustainable, is certainly no longer a
question even for luxury brands for whom the ability to preserve the established brand image is crucial to their survival (Mauer, 2014). Indeed, despite the fact that the luxury brands have been for a long time used to setting trends rather than following them, the potential harm to their brand image resulting from failing to endorse and
promote sustainability at a more significant scale does not leave them indifferent.
The question now however is: How to be sustainable? Do we have the knowledge and resources to be 100% sustainable? And even if so, is it feasible? Can luxury brands be truly sustainable without losing what has often been considered as large part of their very essence, their attractiveness? As rightly asked by Kapferer (2010), should the entire luxury industry switch to minimalism in order to show its support for sustainable development?
Wouldn’t that mean the end of creativity and eventually also the end of fashion as we know it? From a slightly different point of view: A Scottish castle was renovated to be a hotel. Should it be demolished because it consumes more energy than an average modern hotel? Finding common ground is undeniably a difficult task.
Then, the ultimate solution might be to set regulations and policies to supervise and control the plethora and protect the employees and the environment. Governments could make sustainability reports mandatory for
companies. Complexity makes it difficult; the brands are operating in different foreign countries. Should the laws come from a national commitment, in each country, or from an international collaboration? Who has the power
to enforce laws everywhere? Who has jurisdictions? Or do we simply not care because this is not in our advantage to act and turn things around? One could think that if it does not benefit us than it is none of our concern.
In today’s society, we are so consumed by what we want, goods and services, that we seem to forget that there are human beings behind those creations. The EMC have advantages such as cheap labor, raw material, and land.
However, they are unequipped in terms of laws, regulations and ethics. Companies lack CSR, they bring the aforementioned harmful impacts to the EMC while they bring development. Counterbalancing a good for a bad.
We take for granted the very basics rights, we tend to forget our ideas of what is fair and logical are not similar for everyone. Some people seems to think they are above fashion, luxury and that they have nothing to do with it, that it is futile and vain, but they could not be more wrong we are all impacted by fashion and luxury, no matter
who we are and where we are from. One in six humans on Earth is somehow involved in the global fashion industry. This is a reminder of a very simple idea that we tend to forget: Behind every clothes, there are human beings who make it.
As demonstrated by a recent study, conducted by Mauer (2014), if presented with a choice, 59% of the luxury consumers, participating in the actual study, would rather purchase a sustainable luxury product from their beloved brand over a non-sustainable product. This being said, 58% of the respondents from the same study also
claimed that the non-sustainable nature of a luxury product would not stop them from purchasing the product if they liked it, confirming so that in the eyes of luxury consumers’ sustainability is still secondary next to the
product attractiveness (Mauer, 2014); and this naturally poses difficulties for larger well-established luxury companies. To what extent can and should these luxury companies, many of which have long history and shareholders’ interests to protect, embrace sustainability? Even though, many would probably agree that luxury
house of brands, such as Gucci or Dior, have made visible advancements in the sustainable development, as far as the comparison of their ethical actions with their overall environmental footprint is concerned, their efforts can be rightly considered as close to non-existent (Kapferer, 2010; Mauer, 2014).
