Anyone who knows me in this class has probably seen me running into the room wearing one of my four pairs of VEJA shoes every week. Truth be told, the only I reason I bought these shoes were because I saw Meghan Markle wearing them in 2018. I had no idea as to how they were one of the most sustainable shoes in the world. The same was echoed by the VEJA co-founder, Sebastian Kopp, in a 2019 interview when he said that 85% of VEJA customers don’t know about the products sustainability and that they buy the shoes for the design.
Kopp also went on to say that VEJA hates the word sustainability as the term is “too broad” and they rather focus on specific things like its circular design, organic recycled materials, transparency and fair trade. Given that, it is not surprising that the word sustainability is not mentioned once on the company’s website and the “Who we are” section is divided into the detailed chapters about the brand, which is the first I have ever seen for a fashion brand.
VEJA’s “Who we are” webpage
This strongly correlates to the Jacquelyn Ottoman’s “Five Strategies for establishing credibility”, especially “Walk your talk” and “Be transparent”. VEJA goes into great detail about its material procurement (testing and certifications), up-cycling waste, working conditions, and most importantly its CO2 emissions. VEJA’s approach to CO2 emissions is very different from other brands as they take every scope of producing emissions in account which others do not, therefore the chapter “The blindness around CO2 emissions”. This section explains that it is also important to consider activites from their partners and suppliers in calculating CO2 emissions and that is 70% of their emissions.
Infographic on VEJA website taking “everything into account”
Apart from details about their materials, production, reduced environmental impact, the most interesting aspect of VEJA is that it does not advertise. “70% of the cost of a normal big sneaker brand is related to advertising” and VEJA believes that all the money saved from eliminating advertising can be used for the better in improving materials and production. Having no advertising costs also helps VEJA keep their shoes at the same price as other big brands making them financially accessible, which addresses one of the biggest concern with environmentally-friendly fashion.
Looking at VEJA’s amazing achievements in their ESG framework, highlighting the environment pillar, it makes one think if they hate the word “sustainable” and downplay their practices with no ads, shouldn’t all brands be able to do the same and help the environment? Because green fashion should be the norm, not the exception.
Sources
https://project.veja-store.com/en
The New Rules of Green Marketing – https://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/ubc/reader.action?docID=646579
