How Might Sustainability Become the New Luxury
Focus: How Might Sustainability Become the New Luxury by 2025 Across All Kering Brands?
Award-winning Kering & Gucci Group Sustainable Design Strategy 2010-2025
Core Team Member
2010 (launched in 2011)
Note: A lot of client work happens under NDA. This project information is already publicly available.
Above are several examples of how Kering brands have implemented the strategy we developed.
This was an initiative that transformed Kering, the luxury and lifestyle holding company, and all its brands, which include Gucci, Alexander McQueen, Stella McCartney, Puma, Yves Saint Laurent, and more.
Recognition: The initiative continues today and has won numerous awards. It helped Kering become one of the 10 most sustainable companies in the world according to the World Economic Forum.
Our goal was to move beyond the conventional sustainability approach and promote a new business paradigm whereby the attainment of sustainability drives creativity and innovation, and vice versa, to build businesses that deliver financial, social and environmental returns. HOME created four interconnected programs: Leadership (leading a corporate paradigm shift both externally and internally); Humanity (enhancing the social, economic and environmental wellbeing of communities in PPR’s spheres of operation); Ecology (mitigating PPR’s footprint via reduction, offsets and investing in the environment); and Creativity (creating sustainable solutions to support global sustainability). After building the strategy, we tested it with experts in creative, design, humanitarian and environmental sectors. This led to four major investments. We launched a Creative Sustainability Lab through partnership with Cradle-to-Cradle® to re-think and re-consider product and business development. We offset annual global CO2 emissions from PPR’s Luxury group, PUMA and PPR’s headquarters. PUMA began developing the first-ever Environmental Profit and Loss (EP&L) account statement, later rolled out across PPR/Kering companies. Finally, we launched an annual €10 million budget indexed to dividend evolution to enable continued investment in HOME. The project set a new standard in sustainability and business practice in the Luxury, Sport & Lifestyle and Retail sectors.
The original team included the CEOs of Gucci Group (Robert Polet at the time) and Puma (Jochen Zeitz at the time), Head of Kering Americas (Laurent Claquin), a global conservation expert (Holly Dublin), and me. We received considerable input from Burak Cakmak, then Head of Sustainability for the Gucci Group, and later Dean of Fashion at Parson's School of Design.
