Last week, several brands including Zalando and Lululemon responded to accusations of greenwashing. As regulation heats up, especially in the E.U., we’ll see more brands dealing with discrepancies between their marketing and their actual practices. Don’t forget to subscribe to the Glossy Podcast for interviews with fashion industry leaders and Week in Review episodes, and the Glossy Beauty Podcast for interviews from the beauty industry. –Danny Parisi, sr. fashion reporter
More fashion brands are getting hit with greenwashing claims
It’s no secret that fashion, like many industries, is contributing to the warming of the planet. Overproduction and a reliance on fossil fuels and water-intensive manufacturing processes mean that the fashion industry’s carbon footprint is large — although not the second-largest industry after oil, as an oft-repeated factoid claims.
Fashion brands, aware of this image problem, have been adopting sustainable policies to attract climate-conscious customers, or at least adopting the language of sustainability. Last week, Zalando, one of the largest fashion retailers in the world, agreed to eliminate the use of misleading symbols on its website. An E.U. probe claimed the symbols “misled” customers into thinking the products they bought were better for the environment than they really were.
It was a two-year probe by the E.U. which ultimately concluded that Zalando’s symbols were being used misleadingly. Zalando will not be fined for the decision, but it has been required to put more straightforward sustainability-related information on each product. For example, rather than ambiguous symbols that suggest sustainability but are ultimately opaque, it must state the amount of recycled materials used.
It’s the latest in a long run of anti-greenwashing regulation, particularly in Europe where such practices have seen stricter crackdowns, compared to the U.S. H&M was the subject of a class-action lawsuit over misleading claims of sustainability last year that was eventually dismissed in a Missouri court. However, a second class-action lawsuit was filed six months later in December of 2023. It is still ongoing.
And two weeks ago, a climate activist group called Stand.earth lodged a formal complaint with Canada’s Competition Bureau against Lululemon for similar reasons: It claimed that the company’s “Be Planet” marketing campaign obscures the fact that it has done little to improve its impact on the environment.
Regulation is slow around issues like greenwashing. Glossy has written about several cases where companies were punished for fibbing about their sustainability bonafides or absolved. But as the European Union starts to crack down more on the claims brands can and cannot make regarding their sustainable practices, brands hoping to sell in the E.U. will have to think more carefully about their marketing strategies, particularly if they want to use sustainability as a selling point.
