FARFETCH’s unique opportunity to drive positive change

In the latest Inside FARFETCH, Interim Senior Sustainable Business Manager - Conscious, Stephanie Haywood shares her perspective on FARFETCH's sustainable path and some of the company's complementary initiatives to deliver the mission to be the global platform for good in luxury. Hear it from Stephanie!

It starts with a choice

When I applied for my current role in the sustainable business team at FARFETCH, I was in the midst of a transition from a career in luxury fashion sales and marketing to a more impactful path. I was looking for a role at the intersection of innovation, entrepreneurship and impact, and one key decision factor was the scale of the impact I could have on some of the world’s biggest issues, particularly climate change. 

While there were some exciting startups around with impact built into brilliant business models, it was FARFETCH’s unique position in fashion, being connected to millions of customers, and thousands of the world’s leading brands and boutiques, which meant it had a real opportunity to have a tangible positive impact on the fashion industry, that ultimately led to my decision. 

Using our platform to drive change

FARFETCH has made it its mission to be the global platform for good in luxury, and in the 10 months since joining, I have been able to verify from the inside what this means in practice. One of the pillars of the group’s sustainability strategy is ensuring that FARFETCH only sells, or makes (through the New Guards Group brands) products that are considerate of their impact on people, planet and animals (we label these products as Conscious on our marketplace). Another pillar is circularity, with a goal to be more circular than linear by 2030. 

There are two very clear angles in this mission and I think it is a good illustration of how effectively FARFETCH’s unique platform structure can serve brands and boutiques : 

Helping customers buy better 

We help our customers make better choices by making it easier and more rewarding to discover, evaluate and purchase Conscious products, but also by offering them services that enable them to extend the life of their fashion items (FARFETCH second life for reselling handbags, FARFETCH Refresh for clothing). With nearly 4 million active customers, we have a huge opportunity - and arguably the responsibility - to influence customer behaviour. And with over 1,400 brands on the marketplace, Conscious customers are spoilt for choice.

Assisting brand and boutique partners in their sustainability journey

We work with our brand and boutique partners to help them expand their Conscious product and services offer, on FARFETCH and beyond, but also find impactful efficiencies in their operations. Here are a few examples of how we do this: 

• We provide clarity with independently reviewed criteria for our Conscious label 
• We leverage our platform data and global customer base insights to evidence the strength of customers’ appetite for Conscious fashion and beauty, and the related commercial trends, in our Annual Conscious Luxury Trend report. We also encourage our partner brands to use our marketplace as a testing ground for their forays into Conscious fashion. 
• We create innovative tools for Brands, such as Good Measures, co-developed with ethical brand rating agency Good on You, which helps brands understand and improve their sustainability impacts. 
• Our unique platform structure means we can also offer digital solutions for brands and boutiques to harness the opportunities offered by the emergence of circular behaviors (resale as a service via Luxclusif, the group’s B2B resale platform) but also to address some of their operations environmental impact while improving margins (for example, digital size and fit solutions that lower returns rates as part of our FPS offer). 

From a competitive to a collaborative mindset

One of my key projects in the past year has been to pull all these resources together into an easily accessible Conscious Toolkit for our brand and boutique partners, to ensure they take full advantage of all the support we can provide. As we consulted with some of our partners to get this right, it was very apparent that in the sustainability space, there is a huge appetite from brands to collaborate with FARFETCH and with other brands, and learn from each other, which was somewhat of a surprise. The urgency of the task at hand just doesn’t allow for the old competitive ways. So over and above the tools and solutions that we offer, I believe that what gives FARFETCH a unique opportunity to drive change in our industry, is the strength of our relationships with our Brand and boutique partners, and our role as a connector for the industry - and that is also what it means to be the global platform for good in luxury.

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