The French sustainability platform Carbonfact is taking over its German competitor Vaayu Tech GmbH. The two companies announced this together today. The purchase price is not yet known.
With the takeover, the two largest decarbonization tools for the fashion industry will now work under one roof. Existing customers switch to Carbonfact. The combined portfolio now includes more than 300 clothing and footwear brands, including On, Ganni, The North Face and Ace & Tate.
Both platforms operate in the area of carbon accounting. While Carbonfact focuses on automating data collection and conducting life cycle assessments (LCA), Vaayu focused on integrating with external systems and presenting environmental impact to consumers in an understandable way.
A well-known practical example is the collaboration with the French designer fashion platform Vestiaire Collective. Vaayu developed the ‘cost-per-wear’ formula for this. This allows consumers to calculate the actual cost of a purchase per wear. For Vinted The analysts at Vaayu calculated the environmental benefits of second-hand purchases compared to new goods.
Vaayu was founded in 2020, a year before Carbonfact. The founder is Namrata Sandhu, the former sustainability director at Zalando. She raised more than $13 million in growth capital for her start-up from investors including Flint Capital and The Garage.
The creation of both companies was a response to new European product transparency laws. At the time, an ambitious legislative package seemed to be on the way. Fashion and footwear brands needed to quickly gain insight into their supply chains and production processes and sought help calculating their environmental footprint. Meanwhile, many of the plans on the Brussels agenda have been suspended or postponed, partly due to the weakening of the so-called omnibus directive.
Despite the delays from Brussels, it remains crucial for major fashion brands to have their data management under control. They must meet strict European regulations by 2030 at the latest. These include the Extended Producer Responsibility (EPR) and the Ecodesign Regulation (ESPR), which also include the Digital Product Passport (DPP).
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