What we learned at Kering’s sustainability panel

On an early Friday morning last week, journalists, fashion analysts, and executives gathered at the brightly lit top floor of The Shed at Hudson Yards in New York City.

The occasion? Kering—the parent company of Gucci and Saint Laurent Paris, among several other luxury brands—was set to make a big announcement and had lined up speakers including: Marie-Claire Daveu, its chief sustainability and institutional affairs officer; Antonella Centra, Gucci’s EVP and general counsel of global sustainability and corporate affairs; and Ingvar Helgason, VitroLabs co-founder and CEO.

Then came the reveal: Kering was committing to cut down its greenhouse gas emissions by a whopping 40% by 2035, using 2021 as a baseline.

“If we want to truly decarbonize our global businesses, we need to move from carbon-intensity reductions to absolute reductions,” François-Henri Pinault, Kering chairman and CEO, said in a press statement following the event. “I am convinced that impact reduction in absolute terms combined with value creation must be the next horizon for truly sustainable companies.”

All encompassing: The decision is part of the conglomerate’s larger sustainability strategy that comprises a series of other climate, biodiversity and circularity-related goals. Speaking at the event on Friday, Daveu said the goals were part of “three layers” of the company’s strategy starting with fair production. “It’s really to produce what we sell and of course [add] new technologies like artificial intelligence,” she said. “We will have to continue to have a better inventory interface, better tracking…so many operational policies.”

She added the company will also focus on pushing quality over volume and optimizing its processes and raw material sourcing. “I come back to regenerative agriculture, raw materials which are coming from a circular approach,” she said. “It will be a great tool.”

Beyond circularity, the retailer will also be pushing sustainability through its secondhand platform where customers can “choose to reuse the old products and to make them modern,” Daveu said, emphasizing an overall “matrix approach.”

“We are focused on the target [but] there is not a magic solution,” she said. “That’s why we put a lot of our brands on our board.”

Full circle: In a follow-up panel discussion, Centra also shed light on how the brand’s partnership with the Circular Lab platform will help foster its sustainability goals.

“Sustainability is not a competitive thing. You need to join forces to be able to grow and scale,” she said. “We didn’t have to reinvent the wheel; we simply maximized what was already effective and efficient within our organization.”