Marte Hentschel is CEO of Sqetch, a B2B sourcing platform for the fashion and textile industry based in Amsterdam and Berlin, and Co-CEO of Vorn – The Berlin Fashion Hub, a phygital platform for sustainable developments in the fashion industry. The sustainability expert is also a long-standing project partner of the Fashion Council Germany and a professor at the BSP Business & Law School in Berlin.
In an interview, Hentschel talks about digitization, circular economy and artificial intelligence.
This interview was dated Fashion Council Germany written. In cooperation with FashionUnited, exciting German fashion labels and designers who are members or partners of the FCG are presented at regular intervals.
You founded ‘Vorn’ together with Magdalena Schaffrin and Max Gilgenmann from the strategy consultancy studioMM04. What is the vision behind it?
‘Vorn – The Berlin Fashion Hub’ is a physical and digital place in the heart of Berlin, where innovations for a sustainable development of the fashion industry are jointly designed, implemented and made accessible. We offer an inspiring place for exchange and knowledge transfer and act as an intermediary between high-tech development and the fashion and creative industries.
Our focus is in particular on brands and creatives, NGOs and research institutes as well as start-ups and scale-ups along the fashion and textile value chain, including technology and digital companies. Our goal is to promote, accelerate and communicate innovations for sustainable development. We achieve this through our four programs that build on each other: Community Services and Coworking, Innovation Lab and Scaling Programs. As a registered cooperative, we work profit-oriented, but with the focus on the common good. We cooperate with German, European and international partners and organizations to advance the future of fashion.
You are also active as a consultant, coach and speaker. What is still the biggest challenge in transforming the industry into a circular economy?
From my point of view, the core problem lies in the devaluation and the short lifespan of products due to immense overproduction. In the last 20 years, consumption has doubled while the price and useful life have halved. Each European citizen generates an average of 15 kilograms of textile waste per year, with less than one percent being recycled.
Addressing this problem requires structural solutions that need to be developed jointly by politics, industry and civil society. This includes longer-lasting products and an extensive recycling infrastructure. We actively participate in this transformation process through research and development projects and through our participation in multi-stakeholder initiatives and forums.
As a Sqetch CEO, digital issues are the order of the day for you. There is a lot of discussion about artificial intelligence right now. How do you rate the topic for the (digital) fashion industry?
As a key technology, artificial intelligence will change the entire value chain in the long term. At Sqetch, we are committed to providing fashion brands and manufacturers with information about potential environmental impacts along their supply chain. In doing so, we want to help them to make informed and sustainable purchasing decisions in advance.
You also teach at the BSP Business & Law School and were previously active at the fashion school AMD in Berlin. Are there any topics that have increasingly come into focus in your teaching?
The promotion of digital and sustainable transformation is a central part of my teaching activities. It is of great importance that the future designers and managers have the right tools and methods to be effective as change agents in companies. For this reason, we cooperate with a large number of industrial partners, NGOs and research organizations. We also take a look at other industries that are more advanced than the fashion industry in terms of digital and sustainable transformation.
Sustainability and CO2 neutrality are now a matter of course for almost all companies and start-ups. What do you need to convince consumers of your service or product?
Despite the existence of more than 200 sustainability seals, consumers are often overwhelmed and have difficulty assessing which sustainability statements are trustworthy. In addition, greenwashing scandals contribute to the fact that although 70 percent of all consumers are interested in sustainability, less than 10 percent of the products sold are actually non-conventional – “attitude-behavior gap”.
In order to tackle this problem, legislative initiatives are currently being developed within the framework of the EU textile strategy, which aim at more transparent and more reliable consumer communication. An example of this is the Digital Product Passport, which is intended to make sustainability features and supply chain information recognizable at a glance.