Last week I popped along to London Graduate Fashion Week to listen to Farfetch’s Director of Sustainability, Thomas Berry talk about their approach to sustainability and sustainable fashion…

Farfetch – a luxe fashion marketplace platform operating with 400 boutiques internationally and 3,000 brands – was founded with the intention of supporting and giving small independent boutiques a leg up in the market.

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Now they are taking this approach further with a new approach to operating a sustainable business with less social and environmental impact.

The focus is on being cleaner, conscious, circular and changing. I took some notes to elucidate each of these points:

– Improving overall carbon footprint and the impact of packaging by using new fitting technologies (Thomas mentioned some really interesting body scanning software that could be used to enable this, would be amazing for this to be put in place!)

– Packaging to be printed with source of origins information and to come from certified sources.

– Making basic distribution more efficient – eg. incentivising boutiques to use right size boxes and to also ship from and store in Farfetch distribution centres.

– Encouraging consumer to buy in better ways to, in turn, encourage manufacturers to make in better ways, choosing better materials and factories.

– Using tech based tools to encourage transparency – eg. block chains which drives transparency.

– Using sustainable rating app Good On You (which rates 3000 brands on environment, social and animal).

– Creating the Farfetch Conscious Edit – 65 brands & 10-15,000 products.

– New ways of working to reduce waste, extending life of clothes & creating new revenue streams for growth. Supporting & promoting vintage buying & selling with Farfetch Second Life –featuring 27 brands which you can trade in to receive credit. And you can shop pre-owned designer pieces here.

– Driving change across the fashion industry and making fashion a force for good by supporting Kiva micro loans.

It’s brilliant to see brands like Farfetch making changes like these, and helping encourage and inform others as they go! The outfit I am wearing is gifted and I chose the pieces from the Farfetch Conscious Edit which has an incredible selection of brands and pieces.