The Bumpy Road to Sustainability

The Bumpy Road to Sustainability

What Adore Me teaches us about honest innovation in fashion

As Paris Fashion Week highlights creativity and craftsmanship, it also brings into focus a more complex question facing the industry: how can sustainability move beyond aspiration and become embedded in everyday business practice?

In this interview, we speak with Romain Liot, EDHEC alumnus and co-founder and former COO of Adore Me, about what it takes to operationalise sustainability in a mass-market context. His experience offers a rare, behind-the-scenes look at how one fast-growing lingerie brand approached sustainability not as a communications exercise, but as a continuous process of data, trade-offs, and integration. 

From chaos to clarity

When Adore Me first committed to sustainability, the path forward was far from clear.

“At first, it was chaos,” recalls Romain Liot. “We had no perfect plan or deep expertise, only a conviction that we needed to start.”

Like many fashion brands, Adore Me operated within a complex system: globalised production, fast-moving collections, and highly price-sensitive consumers. This was not a niche sustainability pioneer, but a representative case of the broader industry, where most of the environmental impact occurs. Faced with a lack of practical frameworks, the company turned to what it knew best: data. When existing tools proved insufficient, Adore Me developed its own internal scoring system, the AIM Index (Adore Me Impact Matrix), to measure sustainability at the product level.

The index evaluates products across four key impact areas—fiber, waste, water, and chemicals—on a scale from 0 to 5. Early results were strikingly low, with an initial score of 0.06. Rather than obscure these findings, the team used them as a baseline for iterative improvement. Today, the AIM Index is in its fourth generation, providing a transparent way to track progress over time.

The limits of the “green premium”

One of the company’s early lessons was economic rather than technical.

Experiments with sustainability-focused collections revealed that most consumers are only willing to absorb a limited price increase. While a small premium may be acceptable, significant cost increases quickly become a barrier—particularly in times of economic uncertainty.

As Romain Liot puts it candidly, purchasing decisions are often driven by immediate needs rather than long-term environmental considerations.

This reality led Adore Me to reframe the challenge: sustainability had to be achieved within the constraints of mass-market pricing. Materials, processes, and innovations needed to align with cost structures, not sit outside them. Over time, many of the company’s more sustainable products reached cost parity with their conventional equivalents.

The implication is clear: scaling sustainability requires solving for cost, not relying on niche positioning.

Collaboration across the value chain

If cost is one constraint, supply chain complexity is another.

Fashion production is highly fragmented, with multiple actors across tiers and geographies. Progress is often slowed by misaligned incentives and uneven capabilities across the chain. Adore Me chose to engage more deeply with its suppliers, including Tier-2 partners that many brands rarely interact with directly. This long-term, relational approach enabled greater transparency, joint problem-solving, and shared commitments. To further accelerate innovation, the company launched a Sustainability Accelerator, offering climate-tech startups the opportunity to test solutions in real operational conditions. This created mutual value: startups gained a first commercial partner, while Adore Me accessed emerging technologies at an early stage.

One example is its collaboration with EverDye, a French cleantech company developing low-carbon dyeing processes. In 2023, Adore Me became the first brand to use EverDye’s bio-based pigments at scale, achieving significant reductions in emissions from dyeing—one of the largest contributors to fashion’s Scope 3 footprint.

Focusing where impact matters most

For Romain Liot, meaningful sustainability efforts must address Scope 3 emissions—those embedded across the value chain.

In fashion, processes such as dyeing alone account for a substantial share of emissions, far exceeding areas that are often more visible to consumers. While short-term, high-visibility initiatives can be appealing, Adore Me prioritised actions that deliver measurable reductions within a realistic timeframe.

This pragmatic approach also extends to carbon offsets. While useful as a complementary tool, they are not seen as a substitute for operational change. As Liot summarises: reduction must come first, offsetting second.

Data as infrastructure

A defining feature of Adore Me’s approach is the integration of sustainability into its core data systems. Rather than treating sustainability as a separate reporting layer, the company embedded environmental metrics alongside financial and operational data. Cost, margin, inventory, and sustainability performance are considered together in daily decision-making. This level of integration, Liot argues, is essential for credibility and effectiveness—particularly as advanced technologies such as generative AI begin to shape how decisions are made. In this context, data quality and coherence become key differentiators between substantive action and superficial claims.

Rethinking organisational design

Finally, Adore Me’s organisational model offers important lessons.

Instead of building a large central sustainability team, the company distributed responsibility across functions. Employees in sourcing, logistics, marketing, and data were empowered to integrate sustainability into their respective roles, supported by training and a small coordinating team. Today, around a quarter of employees actively contribute to sustainability initiatives as part of their core responsibilities. This distributed ownership reduces silos and embeds sustainability into everyday operations.

From ambition to integration

Adore Me’s journey illustrates a broader point: sustainability in fashion is not a linear transition, but a continuous process of experimentation, constraint, and alignment.

What stands out is not perfection, but transparency and persistence. By grounding its efforts in data, engaging deeply across its value chain, and integrating sustainability into its operating model, the company demonstrates what it takes to move from ambition to implementation. As the industry continues to evolve, such approaches may prove essential—not only for reducing environmental impact, but for redefining how fashion businesses create value in a changing world.