Chanel Is Entering the Recycling Business

Summary

• Chanel is launching a recycling business called Nevold.
• The entity will produce recycled materials from fabric offcuts, unused textiles, and unsold items at scale to address luxury’s resource scarcity problem.

After slowing down its price hikes in the wake of declining sales, Chanel has announced an entirely new business venture: a standalone imprint dedicated to making recycled materials from fabric offcuts, unused textiles, and unsold items at scale.

Titled Nevold (short for “never old”), the entity is led by Sophie Brocart, the former CEO of Patou, who joined the Chanel team in January. Under her leadership, Nevold will become a “business-to-business open platform” that tackles resource scarcity, as many of luxury’s favorite textiles, including cashmere, silk, and leather, face threats from climate change, per Business of Fashion.

The business also addresses the fashion industry’s waste problem, the brunt of which is often placed on fast fashion. Luxury, however, claims a fair share in the damage, with unsold inventory at industry-leading conglomerates like Kering and LVMH climbing to billions of dollars over the last decade.

“We started by asking ourselves what happens to the materials that don’t make it into a final product, or those that reach the end of their first life,” Bruno Pavlovsky, Chanel’s president of fashion, told Vogue Business. “At Chanel, we didn’t destroy unsold products. But we also didn’t yet have a real system to understand their full potential. Nevold is that system.”

Under the Nevold umbrella, there are three key operations: L’Atelier des Matières, the Chanel-created recycling company that pairs brands with textile waste solutions; Filatures du Parc, the leading European wool spinning mill known for its recycled yarns; and Authentic Material, the French leather recycling imprint.

Working in tandem with each company, Chanel’s goal is to make Nevold a key component of a “profound transformation process that is rethinking the entire product lifecycle, developing new savoir-faire and professions… and contributing to a more circular economy,” according to a release.

“It’s not about Chanel recovering her waste to do Chanel,” Pavlovsky said to BoF. “It’s Chanel recovering waste from Chanel and from whoever on the market who [is] ready to sell us the waste to recreate a new kind of materials.”