PARIS — To meet its goal of offering full product traceability across its portfolio of brands by 2025, SMCP has partnered with French mission-driven startup Fairly Made, it announced on Wednesday.
The owner of the Sandro, Maje, Claudie Pierlot and De Fursac labels will roll out a pilot program with spring 2022 deliveries, with information on some 40 references per brand accessible through each item’s product pages on e-commerce sites.
In-store labels with QR codes will follow later, giving access to information such as manufacturing location, the number of kilometers an item has traveled and where materials come from.
Fairly Made, which was founded in 2018 as a sustainable sourcing and manufacturing company by French entrepreneurs Camille Le Gall and Laure Betsch, has been tasked with collecting information from all of SMCP’s suppliers through the production chain to calculate a traceability score.
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SMCP’s chief executive officer Isabelle Guichot stated the project, part of the group’s One Journey strategic roadmap, was a major step in “reducing our carbon footprint and continuously improving our supply chain while offering greater transparency” and would be “a valuable tool for analyzing and optimizing our sourcing around the world.”
The accessible luxury player continues to be embroiled in a dispute between former majority owner European TopSoho, a division of ailing Chinese apparel firm Shandong Ruyi, and GLAS, the trustee that has owned a 29 percent stake in SMCP since European TopSoho defaulted on bonds last September.
In January, its shareholders voted to dismiss five board members representing European TopSoho. They were replaced by three independent directors, including seasoned executive and former CEO of Unibail Rodamco Westfield Christophe Cuvillier, later appointed chairman of the company’s board.
SMCP’s 2021 full-year results will be announced on March 9. Last October, it had indicated confidence in its ability to reach sales of 1 billion euros despite a slowdown in sales growth in the third quarter.
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