Making Fashion Sustainable Needs a Program

Oct 21, 2022

Marco Guazzoni is Sustainability DIrector at Vibram. As he had to build his role in a multinational company, the most important lesson he had to learn early was how necessary is to have an holistic approach.

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The decision to launch Between Conscious Program is driven by the mission to ease a change in the fashion industry.

BETWEEN consultancy supports the process to focus on values and integrating them into the corporate identity, and to find the best professionals with high-level team scouting.

Sometimes all you needed was some inspiration: Between Conscious Program, therefore, started a journey to show you how diverse can be the range of impactful changes that professionals are able to bring in.

Meet the professionals and discover all the possible routes in the journey to sustainability.

Sustainability as a Program - Marco Guazzoni

An outdoor sports lover with an MBA, Marco Guazzoni is an engineer and a manager, who decided to make a job out of his passion. This could come true by joining Vibram, a company deeply rooted in the lifestyle of its historical founder, a talented mountaineer. Today Vibram both manufactures and licenses the production of Vibram-branded rubber outsoles for footwear designed to keep hikers’ safety and comfort in their mind.

With such an outlook, product innovation could never be detached from an attachment to the environment. Marco Guazzoni was the first to interpret the Sustainability Director role for the company, and he did so with a truly holistic approach.

Sustainability is Not a Project

“In 2017 the ownership asked me to run a sustainability project. I studied it and told them it would have been useless. Projects have a starting and an ending point. What we needed was a program: aiming for achievable targets by running several little projects under the consistent direction of a bigger plan.

As Innovation and R&D Manager I used to have 100 to 150 people under my management. As Sustainability Director I started completely alone, but I could ask to more than 100 people across all departments and all branches on a global scale - in US, China and Europe - for something between 5 and 20% of their working time.

Every department and geography is involved: the flow of information is in both direction, in order to confirm and establish the central strategy everywhere.

Global Standards, Local Practice

In Vibram we obviously aim for consistency and standard processes, but some decisions need to be adapted according to the local environment.

To set up the standard, the first step was to create an ethical code of conduct. We make sure that all of our partners and suppliers sign it, which means they all need to behave according to our values.

Values are always applicable, even in contexts where it seems impossible. For example in Vietnam  the working day is 12 hours long with no Saturday off, which would be illegal in Italy. We can’t just back off, otherwise we would be out of business. What we can do is to push in order to get a different treatement for the workers and a better salary to compensate them. The strategy needs to be solid and global, but we also need to be flexible.

We need to make sure to have the supply chain under control. We need to keep control over the social aspect (such as workers, environment, local communities, etc) and the use of materials (i.e. making a list of restricted substances, dangerous for the people and for the environment)

Educational Programs

In Vibram I obtained very soon to put at least one sustainability goal in the yearly MBO of our employees and managers. This was crucial, because I believe that in every company the true key to achieve anything is to engage the employees.

We obviously have had a quite wide range of training and educational programs but what made the biggest impact was what we call “company volunteering”. It means that the company picks volunteering projects to support, and we do not just throw money at the problem by doing charity. Instead, we give away employees’ time.

Every employee dedicates one day per year - and in the near future probably two days per year - and can choose a project to join in. It is usually about cleaning up local parks or public spaces close to the company venue: this kind of activity grows the sense of community and stewardship over the local community and all nature at large.

After activating all people inside Vibram, we started to engage our partners as well, no matter where. The third step is, starting next year, to involve the consumers: most likely, through some of the sports activities we support, inviting a team to clean up after the event takes place.

In the end we try to create a virtuous circle of good deeds. The employees respond very well to this, because they can feel and touch that Vibram is doing what it is saying, and not just “greenwashing”. Which is one of the biggest problems in the industry”.

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