Luxury brand Lestrange links with Vaayu on consumer carbon impact calculator

As consumers become more eco-aware, they’re looking for ways to put sustainability into action without facing big hurdles. So a development announced Thursday — the “world’s first lifecycle calculator with live data insights to inspire customers to cut their climate impact in seconds” — is interesting.

It comes from London-based luxury menswear brand Lestrange and climate tech start-up Vaayu and is called Re_Count.

We’re told it “helps customers shop and care for their clothes more intentionally by sharing data insights to explore fashion and care habits with actionable tips that could cut emissions per wear by up to 50%”. 

The aim is to help customers see how their fashion habits impact their environmental footprint at a time when retail is responsible for 25% of global carbon emissions, and the fashion sector alone is on track to generate 2.1 billion metric tons in 2030. 

Vaayu has developed an app offering an interactive online experience that “explores shopping and aftercare habits using live data within the context of an annual carbon budget”.

The company said that “during the fashion-frenzy of Black Friday, it offers a new lens for customers to shop more intentionally, encouraging awareness around the impact that these purchases have on the planet over their lifespan”.

So how does it work? Customers can “play with various scenarios by answering a set of questions to assess how decisions such as product selection and aftercare choices can extend the life of a garment and, in turn, decrease its footprint over the full product lifetime”. 

The fluctuating CO2e impact of making small changes, like modifying washing methods, is shown so consumers can “really understand how their choices shape up against their environmental footprint, with easy tips on how to make reductions”. 

Clearly there’s a lot of information for people to digest. But to avoid overwhelming them, the company said that “the complex nuances are simplified so that customers can explore different levers”.

That means they can see how adjustments such as wearing an item for longer between washes, reducing the washing temperature or holding on to it for an extended period of time “can either increase or decrease the overall footprint of that garment in a way that has never been seen before”.

Vaayu co-founder and CEO Namrata Sandhu said it’s the first time an “interactive, science-based tool of this granularity has been launched to the consumer market, quantifying emissions data live at a per wear level to inform customer choice”.

And Will Green, co-founder of Lestrange, added: “Bringing the fashion industry’s footprint inside planetary boundaries will only happen by considering every phase of a product’s lifecycle. With Re_Count we’re bringing to market a first-of-its-kind approach to empower and hopefully inspire customers to make more intentional decisions with the way they use and care for their clothes — and crucially — giving people context for how their decisions ladder back to wider science based targets or their own carbon budget, all in an easy to explore calculator”.