12 minute read
LUXURY IS DEAD. LONG LIVE
LUXURY IS DEAD. LONG LIVE LUXURY.
The luxury industry must radically change if it really wants to embody the age’s aspirations. MARK STEVENSON leads a call to arms
Illustration by AASE HOPSTOCK
‘So, the world is on fire – and you sell designer shoes at £800 a pair. What exactly is the point of you?’ This was the challenge I put to the full staff of a luxury footwear brand one afternoon a few years ago, a day the news was dominated with stories of Californian wildfires that had turned much of the state into a vision of hell. The scale of the fires was unprecedented, but no longer. We now grimly accept that much of the world is a tinderbox, just one indicator of our broken relationship with our fragile home.
There was an uncomfortable silence in the room. I let it play out. What, I pressed on, was the point of selling footwear that only the most financially privileged could afford (but certainly didn’t need) in the context of the climate emergency, not to mention a world riven with unconscionable levels of inequality? The silence grew in power as those in attendance looked down at their (no doubt expensive) shoes, shuffled uncomfortably, and offered nothing.
No one had an answer to my challenge, so I relieved them of their gilded misery and told them how they could find relevance and regain a sense of worth in their work – but we’ll come to that later. The recent IPCC report tells us that changes observed in the climate ‘are unprecedented in thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of years’ – include the added effects of the rise in
High sustainability sea levels and the end result is ‘irreversible’. These changes are due to a temperature companies significantly OUTPERFORM their counterparts over the LONG-TERM rise of 1.1 degrees Celcius since the industrial revolution and are the direct result of human activity. The way in which we work and consume makes nearly all of us complicit in nurturing/fostering the economic and political conditions that have created this disaster. And most of us, CEOs and politicians included, feel powerless in the face of the embedded status quo. That complicity and helplessness are a large part of why, according to the Gallup State of the Global Workplace research programme, between 70 and 80 per cent of employees globally feel disengaged from their work. As the corporate world’s sluggish enlightenment creeps forward, everyone from CEOs to sales assistants tell me that their salaries have
now become as much bribery to perpetuate the disaster as they are reward for the (damaging) work done. Those horrific engagement stats are also a proxy for a whole host of mental health problems. You don’t need to be a psychiatrist to understand that when your work and your values are at odds you’re going to suffer. This is bad for everyone. Daniel Pink, author of Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us puts it well: ‘When the profit becomes unmoored from purpose bad things happen – bad things ethically, but also bad things ... like crappy products, like lame services, like uninspiring places to work’. There’s a huge productivity dividend going begging. Imagine what a genuinely engaged workforce would do for the economy.
But there is hope. Covid has given many of us a new lens on the world. As the skies quietened and the air cleared, we began to take stock of our careers and priorities. We witnessed how, when people only buy what they need the economy collapses and wondered, ‘does that make sense?’. We looked anew at the keyworkers who keep our nation going, seeing how they are the most valuable to society, even though we reward them the least – and we felt guilty about it, as we should. We saw how selfish individualism looked ridiculous and unseemly in the face of our communities coming together in the service of one another. We realised that all the money in the world is a poor substitute for an embrace, or even a handshake, and that no earthly reward can compensate us for being absent from the bedside of a dying loved one, or the inability to hold each other up at a funeral. Perhaps, most importantly, many of us came to understand that the pandemic was not a random accident but a symptom, in part, of our damaged relationship with the natural world, and that by association Covid was an ‘amuse-bouche catastrophe’. The main dish, climate change, became larger, not smaller, in our minds. In short, everyone on the planet has been given a lesson in systems, interconnectedness and interdependence. As the pioneering environmentalist John Muir put it, we found out that ‘When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the Universe’.
For luxury brands, selling the concept of exclusivity and opulence, this collective catharsis brings challenges. In a Covid- and climate-changed world almost all the brands in this publication (particularly in light of some of their historical actions) have a problem they cannot ignore. In the wider context of environmental collapse and societal injustice their offerings, if unchanged, look far less like badges of personal success and much more like symbols of our collective failure. If they wish to embody the age’s aspirations, they cannot avoid radical change.
What now? So, what now for the luxury market? What should the assembled brands in this publication do? How do they reinvent themselves to be relevant in the future we face for, as Philip K. Dick once famously put it, ‘Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn’t go away’. The way forward seems obvious. Luxury brands have always sold themselves on the promise of being the best, the most aspirational, the finest of the fine. In the world we’re all having to build together now, that promise must also mean being the most regenerative and ethical. Luxury brands can and must redefine aspiration. The finest products should, by definition, be good for the planet. Indeed, in the future I believe it will be seen as perverse that we ever thought otherwise. This was the message I delivered to those purveyors of fancy footwear. And a regenerative agenda is good for you. The research bears it out time and time again. One reports reads: ‘High sustainability companies significantly outperform their counterparts over the long-term, both in terms of stock market as well as accounting The finest products performance.’1 Why? Because such companies live in the should, by definition, be GOOD FOR THE PLANET. Indeed, in the future real world, they look outwards, and therefore manage risk better. They reduce their own costs by tackling waste and inefficiency. And they have engaged employees whose productivity dwarfs that of less
I believe it will be ethical competitors. But if the carrot doesn’t seen as PERVERSE convince you, perhaps the stick will. The UK has a legally that we ever thought binding net zero target for 2050, to be enforced by the Office otherwise for Environmental Protection. The courts have already shown their willingness to intervene, one example being the Court of Appeal’s ruling that the government’s policy statement in favour of the Heathrow expansion was unlawful, in light of its climate commitments. Ask yourself: do you think a UK government (of any flavour) is going to let businesses off the hook when it comes to meeting the national target? For organisations over a certain size, reporting on emissions is already a legal requirement. It won’t be long before reducing those emissions (and permanently removing what is left) will also be mandated by law. It therefore makes cold hard commercial sense to get ahead of that legislation and clean up your act (and see your less enlightened competitors flounder when the laws do pass). Here’s another idea being discussed by certain governments: reduced corporation tax for businesses that advance the UN sustainable development goals (and by the same token, higher bills for those that do not). You know what to do.
1. Harvard Business School, ‘The Impact of Corporate Sustainability on Organizational Processes and Performance’ – Robert G. Eccles, Ioannis Ioannou, and George Serafeim
MAKE THE CHANGE
Here are four initial critical actions brands should take to get them started on the road to a net carbon zero future:
1Join Race To Zero, the UN-backed global campaign helping companies, cities, regions, financial and educational institutions ‘take rigorous and immediate action to halve global emissions by 2030 and deliver a healthier, fairer zero carbon world in time. unfccc.int
2Appoint a Chief Climate Officer to the board with the same standing and power as every other C-suite executive.
3Commit to permanently removing from the atmosphere the emissions you cannot mitigate. This is neither paying someone else not to pollute, nor planting trees that will take years to sequester the carbon you’ve already emitted (if they survive). You cannot ‘offset’ your responsibilities. Instead find the suppliers who can offer verified and permanent ways to remove your emissions and help build the removals market, as enlightened companies like Shopify and Stripe are. Without a permanent removal industry we are all toast.
4Understand that this is your moment to do something fantastic and life affirming. You have the privilege of being alive as we face humanity’s greatest crisis and the ability to do something about it. If, as John Muir said, everything is ‘hitched to everything else’, that means you are connected to everything around you. What you do ripples out across time and space and in this moment of crisis it matters whom you choose to be. To quote the great Jane Goodall, ‘What you do makes a difference, and you have to decide what kind of difference you want to make.’ n
COLLABORATION OVER COMPETITION
Walpole, the official sector body for UK luxury, launched its Sustainability Manifesto in 2020 and, says CEO Helen Brocklebank, it is only through working together that brands will succeed in transforming the industry for the better
Luxury is one of the fastest growing and most successful industries in the UK, representing the highest standards of creativity, innovation and quality. Prior to the pandemic, British luxury was worth £48 billion to the UK economy, growing at a rate of 9.6 per cent annually and employing 160,000 people throughout the country in long-term, skilled jobs. These are all tremendous reasons why British luxury is fundamental to rebuilding our economy and re-establishing Britain on the world stage. However, these brands play an even more important role: long before the UK was announced as the host of COP26, many British luxury brands had committed to their role in protecting people and planet, and working to towards a more sustainable future for all.
In January 2020, recognising the potential for British luxury to play a key leadership role in driving this goal, Walpole, with the support of McKinsey & Co, launched the Walpole Sustainability Manifesto, aligned to the UN Sustainability Goals. It establishes best practice in sustainability for the British luxury sector with four overarching principles (see illustration opposite): to lead the transition towards a circular economy; to safeguard the environment and natural resources; to guide partners and suppliers towards sustainable practices; and to advocate equal and respectful working conditions. Importantly, these aspirations are designed to see British luxury fulfil the 2030 UN Sustainable Development Goals, becoming part of the broader, global push for a fairer, more sustainable world.
But none of this can be achieved individually – collaboration among peers is vital to transform our sector. So, in addition to creating a framework for a sustainable future we also created forums to enable cross sector collaboration by running our category working groups. Over 100 members including Burberry, dunhill, Harrods, Johnstons of Elgin, Mulberry, The Savoy and Chivas Brothers, among others (including many celebrated here), share expertise and contacts, combine resources, problem solve and align on areas of joint action to accelerate the pace of change.
Earlier this year, Walpole published a comprehensive report on the progress its members have made in powering their businesses towards a net carbon and zero waste future, one year on from the launch of our manifesto. It makes for impressive reading and bears testament to the incredible progress that Walpole members have made in driving forward the sustainability agenda with many examples of radical collaboration where global players support emerging brands on material sourcing; where competitive businesses openly discuss the challenges of measuring their Scope 3 emissions or how they are reducing plastics across their supply chains; where fashion brands talk with interiors businesses to discuss cashmere and leather sourcing. From large scale collaborative efforts on inbound packaging to simply sharing the contact details of local suppliers, every interaction results in positive change.
A central topic in the working groups is, of course, climate action and the work that brands like Mulberry, Burberry and others in the sector are doing to audit and reduce their emissions in their own operations, where they are necessarily off-setting in the short-term, how they are starting to work with their supply chains on the steep challenge of Scope 3 – all with the objective of achieving Net Zero by 2050, and much earlier in many cases, as luxury brands work hard to achieve the goal ahead of the UN target. Several brands have opted to use Science Based Targets while smaller players are working with individual consultancies to audit their operations and establish annual reporting structures. At Walpole, we are working with Race to Zero ahead of COP26, urging members to sign up to the global campaign.
We hope that you will be inspired and informed by the journeys featured in the following pages – the progress and challenges of 26 brands from across the UK luxury sector, many of which are Walpole members. Their collective efforts and generosity of spirit exemplify the luxury sector’s leadership role and provide and example that other sectors should follow.why businesses in other sectors should follow their lead. By sharing our ideas and our efforts we can accelerate our efforts to avert climate disaster. This is a shared mission: luxury is not luxury unless it is committed to sustainability.
