1982. That year Tron was released, the movie in which Jeff Bridges ended up inside a video game fighting for his life. At that time, walking through virtual scenarios sounded like science fiction, like something from a very, very distant future. Something similar happened with sustainability.
The term did not yet have the environmental meaning that it has in 2021. At most, they talked about ecology and it was the thing of an advanced minority. Nobody considered, for example, that fashion could also be sustainable. Much less than the stores and contact with the merchant could be through a screen. Four decades later, ‘walking’ through an online store and chatting with its owner through social networks is common.
Now, the concept of sustainability has gained significance and involves all sectors of society, including fashion. This industry generates between 4,000 and 5,000 million tons of CO? per year. Textiles would, therefore, be responsible for between 8% and 10% of global CO? emissions, according to an article published last year in Nature Reviews.
The rise of fast fashion and low cost, with the mentality of buying cheap and on impulse thanks to the reduced cost, which leads to using rarely, throwing away and buying again, has managed to double the production of clothes. The environmental impact of all this is significant: if in 1978 a person consumed 6 kilograms of clothing per year, in 2018 the figure shoots up to 13 kilograms.
Powering this machinery consumes about 7,900,000 cubic meters of water annually and produces 20% of industrial water pollution, especially in dyeing. And, every time a synthetic fabric is put in the washing machine, it loses fibers that end up adding to the nearly 190,000 tons of micro- and nanoplastic waste in the oceans. In this context, awareness of this phenomenon and its effects has grown at the same pace as the brands that want to put a stop to it.
When Paula del Río left her job in a human resources department in 2005 to start her own shoe store, sustainability was not on her agenda. She called it Suela and opted to sell high-quality, multi-brand footwear. “In 2012 I started working on an industrial waste project and I realized the need to work under sustainable parameters. I began to have more technical notions about textile waste management and sustainable fashion,” she explains. “We were changing our strategy, until in 2016 we consolidated the current business model, where sustainability is the center of everything.”
Paula’s is one of the stories that is given voice in the “Closer Now” initiative, an initiative through which Orange collects the experience that businessmen and entrepreneurs such as the founder of Suela have lived and continue to live. In this online space, which can be visited on the website orangecontuempresa.com, there are various interviews, such as this one with Paula, carried out by the journalist and economics expert Javier Ruiz, to bring the public closer to the reality of the self-employed and Spanish SMEs. .
The objective of the Orange project is to publicize, through real cases, the situations that Spanish self-employed workers and SMEs have to face today, in order to reinvent themselves to adapt their businesses to the new digital and global economy. .
As Paula herself tells Javier, it was a 180-degree turn in the midst of the boom in cheap fashion made in China. Locating quality, beautiful, sustainable and durable materials was not a one-day task. “It took us time, but durability was a priority. What differentiates sustainable footwear from one that is not, is that the former lasts a lifetime; the second, one season,” she recalls. To make the accounts work, she simplified the designs, eliminated components and opted for simpler models, whose main strength would be the materials. “We choose cowhide, recovered cow leather without chrome or nickel and vegetable tanned,” she says.
Apart from leather for the instep and the rest of the upper parts of the shoe, I needed soles. He wanted them original, resistant and sustainable. Almost nothing. She started searching the Internet looking for options and suppliers. She joined the Sustainable Fashion Association of Spain (AMSE) and began attending fairs for sustainable components, experimenting with materials and making samples. Thus she came to the cork oak. “Finally, the first samples of shoes with a greener material were coming out, which allowed us to make high-quality and sustainable footwear.” Currently it has its sights set on pineapple fiber to make the transition to leather of plant origin.
The cork soles have become the distinctive feature of their brand. They are worn by summer sandals, but also by country ankle boots, bluchers and mid-calf winter boots. From his Instagram profile he reminds his followers that this material is ‘a natural fabric full of properties: it insulates, cushions, is resistant, light and waterproof.’ In addition, the packaging is recycled and recyclable.
If Paula kept anything in mind on her journey towards sustainability, it was her carbon footprint when transporting the shoes from the workshop in Menorca to her store in the Madrid neighborhood of Salamanca. After a brief season in Alicante, she decided to settle permanently in Madrid. “It only takes us about 50 minutes by car from the factory to the store,” she says.
Some of the clients arrive when walking in front of their charming establishment. Many others buy directly online (shipping all over the world). He keeps the relationship alive with each other through social networks. It is the forum from which it shares new shoe models or the arrivals at the store of some of the exclusive garments made by hand in organic fabrics that it also distributes. Suela cannot be imagined without everything that the Internet brings to it. It is the other transformation: “Digitalization has had an important role from the beginning. Not only for e-commerce. Today, digital channels are essential for our business because they bring us closer to the public and suppliers.”
Like Paula, there are many entrepreneurs who are thinking about taking that leap into digitalization, especially after a period as difficult for them as the pandemic has been. For this reason, in addition to using experiences such as that of the founder of Suela as a reference, Javier Ruiz carries out an economic analysis of the topic and sector that is addressed at all times, pointing out the opportunities and providing the main recommendations so that entrepreneurs can take advantage of get the most out of your businesses in this new context.
Advice that has a clear purpose: to encourage companies to continue transforming to continue growing. As in the case of Paula, who, taking advantage of the opportunity that digitalization offers her recently, incorporated a new pre-order service in which customers can see the model on social networks, choose the fabric and size and in a few days have the item. tailored to your needs. In Tron’s time all this was a fantasy. Today it is a viable and planet-friendly business.