Sustainability in luxury, earlier an oxymoron, has gone mainstream as secondhand turns out to be one among the many solutions to check environmental damage caused by its extravagance.

The bane of the apparel industry is its highly fragmented and disjointed supply chain. There is an urgent need to integrate the entire supply chain to make it agile, responsive, robust and efficient. Is it doable?

If we listen to the advertising messages by brands and retailers, we could easily be led to believe that most of the products sold today are “green". Sadly, this is far from the truth. And though many efforts are being made, greenwashing still reigns.

The seams they are a’changing! With an addressable market of consumer opportunity of about 100 billion dollars in India up for grabs, the time to launch your D2C brand is now; so what if established physical players are also assuming the D2C avatar which is changing the game rapidly.

It is worth every tannery and trade association buying into ESG to push for doing things correctly at every level. One big area for leather is its longevity and production and design should have this in mind and plan for repair, refurbishment and possible repurposing.

Green logos are not enough to effect environmental challenges and brand narratives that fail to incorporate human degradations leave behind vast numbers of our planet’s people and, thereby, fail to address the ‘social’ in ESG or environmental, social and governance elements.