Material World

Tiffany store in Philadelphia, US. AP Photo/Matt Slocum.

An interesting policy shift is creeping through the luxury industry: after long being terrified of talking about environmental/corporate social responsibility initiatives except in the most covert whispers, a number of voices are now slowly being raised.

There was PPR’s announcement in May that it was creating an “environmental profit & loss account” for sports brand Puma that it 1) made public; 2) then planned to extend to its luxury brands; and 3) then extend into other CSR areas. Then today Tiffany & Co unveiled a new website dedicated to their CSR policies, www.tiffany.com/sustainability (it’s a shocker of a name, I know). It’s a pretty user-friendly experience. LVMH also has a big section on their corporate site devoted to their CSR policies, including an environmental charter and environmental report, but it’s a little harder to find: three or four clicks from the home page.

Anyway, to understand just how big a deal this sudden willingness to shine a golden light on CSR is, consider two stories:

1. For the past year we have been trying to get a feature off the ground on the FT’s Style pages that looks at a product and analyses its costs, environmental and ethical, in order to give readers a sense of how complicated these equations are, and how companies think about the trade-offs. It hasn’t worked, because we keep running up against companies telling us they “aren’t ready” to disclose their decision-making process. Effectively, they are scared that if they reveal any choice that isn’t 100 per cent perfect, they will be seen in a negative light.

2. A few years ago I wrote a story about a World Wide Fund for Nature report called “Deeper Luxury,” which graded 10 public luxury companies in 50 CSR categories; no one got higher than a C+ and a few failed. Tiffany was one of the brands that did badly, primarily because of a lack of public information. After the story was published, Michael Kowalski, the CEO, called me up and asked me to come in and talk about their initiatives, which were actually pretty impressive. When I asked him why they didn’t disclose them, except behind closed doors, he said they were scared to put themselves out there.

Well, I guess they aren’t scared any more. Either they are now giving consumers more credit for being able to appreciate their efforts, however human (ie fallible) they may be, or they have realised that in an age of transparency, fiscal clarity extends to CSR clarity; that these are systemic issues, and they need to be addressed systemically, as opposed to on a need to know basis. Now the 24-carat question is: who’s next?