SloWeAre: Auditing Sustainability in Fashion and Luxury

The case illustrates the founding and growth of SloWeAre, the first eco-certification company in France that embraces the methodology eco-fashion brands employ on their journey towards producing socially responsible and environmentally sound textile products. By 2020, the four-year diagnostic service had attracted more than 75 French eco-fashion brands to the SloWeAre platform. By participating in SloWeAre’s annual audit, these eco-fashion brands prove that they have embedded an end-to-end sustainable process throughout their supply chain that translates into a complete range of certifiable products that eco-consumers can trust. The SloWeAre label helps eco-consumers know the difference between brands that offer just one or two eco-friendly products in their lineup and those that take a holistic approach. SloWeAre presents an alternative for small independent eco-fashion brands looking to save money by sewing in a single-use label that goes directly to who they are and not just what products they sell. In so doing, the sustainable process that SloWeAre advocates presents an ingenious solution to a key challenge facing modest eco-fashion brands without the deep pockets to justify their product lineup with the extreme granularity beloved of retail giants.

The case takes a start-up in the French fashion sector and reveals how it successfully created value in a crowded eco-fashion niche market. The three-page case offers instructors a quick but instructive device to move the conversation about sustainability into a real-life discussion about a couple’s entrepreneurial solution borne out of passion, resourcefulness and pragmatism. The easy-to-read case can nudge students into grappling with the changing lifestyles that have been engendered by eco-friendly communities without getting encumbered by strictures. The eco-fashion matrix is stripped of its complexity and rendered into key talking points that instructors can amplify in courses covering luxury and fashion management, entrepreneurship, family business and sustainable development.