10 takeaways from the World Fashion & European Textiles and Apparel Convention

From 7 to 9 November 2021, the world of apparel and textiles met in Antwerp, Belgium, for a double convention: the World Fashion Convention hosted by IAF, and the European Textiles and Apparel Convention hosted by EURATEX.

Here my top 10 takeaways from this event:

1.????Collaboration and partnerships: to truly work together across the vertical supply chain, risk and upside need be shared between brands, manufacturers and suppliers of raw materials. We can only tackle the challenges that this industry is facing together.

2.????Mapping the hell out of it. What keeps compliance managers up at night? What worries brands when it comes to sustainability and ethical production? It is a huge challenge to truly trace every element that goes into your product. Who is the supplier to the supplier to the supplier? But there are brands that show that you can do it like Ganni or Diesel. Mapping your supply chain is a huge commitment but if you really want to commit to your sustainability goals you need to do it.

3.????Less is more. Saskia Hedrich gave us a sneak preview of McKinseys’ Chief Product Officer survey that is due to be published soon. 50% of CPOs started a major transformation since the pandemic has begun. There is a move towards smaller collections: 53% plan to reduce the number of options by 2025 and 29% plan to increase full price sales by 10%.

4.????Waste. Waste. Waste. Matteo Magnani shared an eye-opening presentation summarising some key stats that the Ellen MacArthur Foundation has collated. Less than 1% of material used to produce clothing is recycled into new clothing and a whopping 73% are eventually landfilled or incinerated. By 2025 the collection of waste will be mandatory, and clearly the industry is not ready for this. From the collection points to the recycling facilities, we need to really step up our game and create the needed infrastructure to handle the 5.5 mio tonne of waste we are facing per year.

5.????Naked but honest. Product Environmental Footprint (PEF) and the full transparency that comes with it makes you naked in front of your competitors and customers, but it is the only honest option. If you don’t measure sustainability, then it’s just greenwashing. In fact, the latest Wovn report on Consumer views on Sustainability in Fashion 2021 that just came out this week, shows that “80% of respondents report being sceptical of fashion brands’ sustainability claims. Many respondents also reported feeling sceptical about claims having to do with fabric sources, indicating that there is often no evidence to prove the provenance of organic fabrics and that they find “100% recycled” claims to be dubious.”

6.????(Not) willing to pay the price. Listening to Lenzing Group’s Robert van der Kerkhof it became very clear how passionate the company is about providing sustainable options, but there is still a long way for these to be adopted widely and for merchandisers & buyers to believe that consumers will pay a small premium for a “sustainable upgrade”. It is worth challenging this scepticism as reports are picking up a change in consumer mindset. IBM’s “2020 Consumers Driving Change” report states that 80% of respondents indicate sustainability is important for them and “for those who say it is very/extremely important, over 70 percent would pay a premium of 35 percent, on average, for brands that are sustainable and environmentally responsible”.

7.????There is a big pot of money to support innovative projects. With the Horizon Europe programme (2021- 2027) the EU makes EUR 80+ billion available for research and innovation projects. And, finally some good post-Brexit news: this is still accessible for UK companies today! If you are thinking about pursuing EU funding, Lutz Walter, SG of ETP shared some great tips. One thing to remember is that hardly any of the EU programmes fund individual companies, so you better buddy up with other change leaders and discuss joint project to access this pot of money.

8.????Streamlining “ingredients”. In an interesting discussion, fashion was compared to the car industry and the question was asked if fashion really needs to re-invent the wheel with every collection and season. What if we could shift to a pre-agreed set of raw materials and accessories and pool these in a smart pay? While this is clearly not applicable for all segments of the market and not for the entire part of a collection, the question is valid and could prove to be very profitable if applied to a sub-segment of merchandise produced.

9.????Blue sky thinking. As often, the side discussions are the best part of a convention and sometimes lead to out of the box (and slightly crazy) ideas. When discussing the huge issue of waste, we talked about the big challenge of blended materials that are way harder to recycle. Christiane Hügelmann from The Holy Fashion Group and I were toying with the idea of creating a deposit system (aka German “Pfand System”) for fashion, where consumers are incentivised to invest into high quality garments. Then when they return them (to the thousands of recycling containers that yet have to be set up before 2025), the amount of money that the consumer gets back for recycling will depend on some garment markers, one being if the garment is made out of a blended material or not. While this might be unrealistic, the question is: how do we reward good behaviour, both for the end consumer but also for brands?

10.?Worth getting away from your screen and back IRL. Last but not least, after 18 months of mainly seeing people via Zoom it was such a nice change to meet people in person. The evening event took place at the MOMU Fashion Museum in Antwerp, which is definitely worth a visit!

A big thank you to both IAF for hosting the World Fashion Convention and to EURATEX for hosting the European Textiles and Apparel Convention. Thank you for bringing a great network together spanning across the entire vertical supply chain.