“Our environmental vision is to contribute to the restoration of the earth’s ecological balance … biodiversity, re-afforestation, pollutant free oceans, waterways and the air we breathe … a return to pristine natural environments.”
The Connection
Our Evolving Business and Environmental
As a company iFarmaissance takes many lessons from pioneers in the fashion and lifestyle industry who have bravely put environmental considerations at the forefront of their brand positioning. For example, long before others seriously started to really take action on net zero transitions Patagonia owner Yvon Chouinard made the statement -
“Economic growth for the past two centuries has been tied to an ever-spiralling carbon bonfire. Business and human success will have to come from working with nature rather than using it up.”
To connect the vision for our business to our environmental vision we took the view that enough has been said about why we are in this position, what if we look forward and all come together to make a contribution. We developed the following environmental vision and linked our business and environmental visions together by using the CISL three dimension framework:
“Our environmental vision is to contribute to the restoration of the earth’s ecological balance … biodiversity, re-afforestation, pollutant free oceans, waterways and the air we breathe … a return to pristine natural environments.”
The connected result is represented by:
- Alignment of our values with the operational activities of the business to give transparency and a point of difference in the market
- Preparedness to make big decisions which might impact revenues in the short term but will bring significant long term benefits (for Patagonia this meant completely eliminating the product the company was formed on because of its environmental outcomes).
- Empower the team to make decisions and innovate with a that they live the same values as we’ve set for the business
- Setting of longer timelines for judging the success of the business. Chouinard has said “ I started making decisions on the assumption that we’d be in business for 100 years, rather than quarter to quarter.”
Across our sector leadership needs to change societal attitudes, slow rather than fast fashion, innovation and true circularity in the raw materials that are the basis for our products and full transparency on labour, social values, energy, emissions, and materials throughout the supply chain.
Life Cycle Assessment
The life cycle assessment (LCA) methodology for assessing environmental impacts associated with all the stages of the life cycle of our products remains the most effective tool for measuring the overall environmental imprint of our products. We are committed to LCA monitoring of all steps in our programme, including the R & D projects we are committed to.
Material resources
Manufacturing
Packaging
Transportation
Use
End of life
Circular Economy & Design
As experienced product designers in the fashion industry, at iFarmaissance we feel an obligation to go beyond re-use and recycling and focus on making transformative, systems-level changes across the complete life cycle of our products to help the world move to a circular economy and towards net zero goals.
This circular economy approach will move us towards decoupling economic growth from the consumption of finite resources.[3]
Our designers take great pride in their ability to create high fashion handbags and accessories, but to do it in a such a way that they consider the full circular impacts of their designs. As we use only biobased materials and deadstock fabrics, each different type of biobased material had its own unique characteristics – varying thicknesses, textures, tensile and tear strengths, water permeability, hand feel etc. This presents an array of issues and challenges in both the conceptualisation and design and a waste management system that eliminates waste, circulates products and materials, and regenerates nature. Our designers reimagine our products to incorporate all these factors.
This process in evolving and ongoing, and a pillar of the circularity model adopted at iFarmaissance.
References:
[3] Ellen MacArthur, Ellen MacArthur Foundation – March, 2022
The circular economy is needed to get to net-zero emissions.
