Thierry Andretta on Mulberry's journey since winning Walpole's Sustainable Luxury Brand of the Year award

Walpole: Personally, what was it like on the night to accept the award?

Thierry Andretta: It was a very proud moment and an important opportunity to be able to thank everyone in the company, as well as our partners, for their continued commitment to this journey that we are on. 

What did it mean for your business to win the award?

Our Made to Last ethos has been at the heart of everything that we do since Mulberry was founded in 1971. As a business we were very proud to be recognised by an independent panel of sustainable experts for our industry leading work and significant progress we have made towards our Made to Last manifesto. 

Since your win, what have the developments been in your sustainability strategy over the past year?

Our circularity scheme, The Mulberry Exchange, continues to be a key focus and an area of the business which is rapidly growing. In September 2023 we were proud to put a spotlight on circularity during fashion week. We introduced a limited-edition collaboration with Stefan Cooke, which championed pre-loved styles from The Mulberry Exchange. The collection was highlighted in Mulberry’s first Pre-Loved pop-up in Soho, London. The pop-up was a celebration of our pioneering circularity programme, and showcased not only the Stefan Cooke capsule but a curated pre-loved range of rare Mulberry treasures and archive styles. 

Alongside this, we launched The Mulberry Exchange in China, celebrating with a series of pop-up exhibitions in four cities called 'British Craft, Made to Last', which brought to life the brand’s Made to Last ethos and skilled leather craft. To help communicate the pop-ups in the market, we worked with actress and sustainability advocate, Zhu Zhu, on a series of images where she carried a pre-loved Mulberry Bayswater. We are one of the first brands – if not the first – in the market to use a celebrity to promote our pre-loved styles. We’re now looking at how we can increase the accessibility of The Mulberry Exchange, to make circular shopping a truly international offering. 

The Lifetime Service Centre Team at The Rookery – one of our two carbon neutral Somerset factories where we still make 50% of our bags – are masters of restoration, and in the last year alone have restored over 10,000 bags. This year, The Willows, Mulberry’s second factory in Somerset, celebrated its 10th anniversary. Through the summer we installed a new solar photovoltaic array at this site, replacing the previous system which was installed during the factory build in 2013. The new system generates 10 times more green electricity than the previous one. This investment in generating our own green electricity will see a substantial improvement in our carbon footprint by reducing our Scope 2 emissions as we head towards our Net Zero 2035 target. 

At the awards, I was proud to announce that since October 2022 100% of our leather is sourced from environmentally accredited tanneries, ahead of our 2023 target, and is carbon neutral which is achieved through offsetting with the World Land Trust. While acknowledging that offsetting isn’t the long-term solution, it’s a step on our journey whilst implementing a radical reduction strategy based on transforming our business to a regenerative and circular model as set out in our Made To Last Manifesto.

We believe for Mulberry to have a truly regenerative and circular future, the business must benefit all people we work with and the communities we’re part of.  Which is why our work with NGOs and charitable organisations is a key pillar in our strategy. This year, we continued our long-standing partnership with The Felix Project, a London-based charity that saves surplus food from suppliers and redistributes it to those that need it the most, and with Mentoring Matters, Flourish in Diversity and The Outsiders Perspective to improve diversity and inclusion within the creative industries. 

We’ve just published our second annual sustainability report which documents the progress we have made over the past year, and our continued dedication to the commitments laid out in our manifesto. Proud as I am of the achievements from the past year, I know that reaching our goal is a constant work in progress. 

What advice would you have for this year’s winner of the sustainability award?

Cross-industry collaboration is crucial in developing more sustainable solutions, this is a shared challenge, and we must support each other in this common goal. Equally as important is to take the customer on the journey with you, creating new norms where buying a great product means buying a sustainable product.

What is top of your sustainability agenda in the coming year?

We are focusing on developing a hyper-local, hyper-transparent supply chain, working in partnership with progressive industry leaders to develop low-carbon leather sourced from a network of organic and regenerative farms. This is a challenge, which is new to the leather industry, and will be a step-by-step process, but we’re making it a priority for the brand.  

We are also working on our carbon reduction pathways and continuing to map our carbon data across the business with the aim of improving visibility. Our science-based reduction targets are currently with the SBTi for verification, and their validation will be a big step on our Net Zero 2035 journey.