The Sustainability Marketing Reality
How Environmental Consciousness is Reshaping Brand Strategy
The Market Transformation
The second-hand luxury market was worth just over $7 billion in 2022, and according to Statista, it's expected to double to $15.4 billion by 2028 at a growth rate of 3%.
In 2025, luxury brands can't afford to treat sustainability as an optional commitment. Consumer expectations have shifted sustainability from nice-to-have to business-critical.
The Implementation Examples
Monica Vinader has made sustainability central to its operations, embracing ethical sourcing and transparency. On some of their product pages, you can click "trace this item" to reveal the product passport, offering full transparency on their manufacturing process.
Within the next few years, many products in Europe will have to be issued the Digital Product Passport (DPP), a European Union regulation introduced as part of the Green Deal that will come into force progressively from 2027.
The Competitive Response
According to BrandZ's CSR Top 100 ratings for 2021, the leading luxury brands (Louis Vuitton, Chanel, Hermès, Gucci, Rolex, Dior, Cartier, Saint-Laurent, Prada, Burberry) improved their CSR ratings by 5 points over 2020, up to 114 in 2021.
The Technology Integration
Edge computing can reduce the carbon impact of data-intensive applications, filtering data locally before streaming only necessary information to centralized clouds, helping telecom companies address sustainability concerns while maintaining service quality.
Blockchain technology enhances sustainability efforts by providing immutable records of environmental impact and ethical sourcing throughout supply chains.