Hennes & Mauritz or more commonly known as H&M — sells fashionable pieces at low prices to many young consumers. The H&M group is a family of brands and businesses that aims to allow customers around the world to express themselves through fashion and design, creating value for people and society. In line with this idea, H&M as a brand has come up with fanciful ways to rebrand itself as an eco-friendly or conscious brand as they call it; birthing H&M Conscious.

H&M Conscious

Building on this effort to be more sustainable, H&M has 3Ps they are mainly concerned with — People, planet and profit. They believe that these 3Ps are interconnected and important as a business entity. 7 commitments have also been established for a more sustainable fashion future (H&M, 2012).

1. Provide fashion for conscious customers
2. Choose and reward responsible partners
3. Be ethical
4. Be climate smart
5. Reduce, reuse, recycle
6. Use natural resources responsibly
7. Strengthen communities

Conscious Collection

I’m sure many of us have heard of H&M’s conscious collection, one that brags to be sustainable, green and all that! But did you know that these conscious pieces have to contain at least 50% of sustainable materials, meaning that materials like organic cotton or recycled polyester have to be used.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CkbggB0IIAs

As a major fast-fashion brand, H&M has always been actively rebranding itself to be one that is sustainable and slow. One of its Stockholm store has a machine called Looop that shreds old garments into new ones over a period of 5 hours. Materials are fed into the machine and within the 5-hour time frame, the yarn is mixed with other recycled fibres and then knitted in the machine (which by the way uses no water nor chemicals – interesting innit?) to create an entirely new garment (Bobb, 2020).

This innovation by H&M inadvertently extends the lifecycles of garments as it transforms unwanted garments into new pieces for consumers promoting a circular economy. The container-sized machine made its public debut in Stockholm in October 2020, allowing people to see how textiles are recycled and also help create awareness about the difficulty of recycling textiles and hopefully inspire consumers to purchase responsibly (Kanayalal, 2020).

As a whole, H&M may appear to be a brand that is keen on changing its image from fast fashion to I suppose slow (still quite fast if I may) fashion. In the next post, we will dive into how all this can be seen as a mere facade or a marketing ploy to deceive consumers, tricking them into thinking that if they were to buy from H&M they are thus active contributors to a cleaner fashion industry.

 

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