The French ready-to-wear accessories brand CABAÏA takes stock of the 3 scopes of its GHG assessment

Cabaïa makes colourful accessories to simplify everyday life and give our customers a dose of good humour. We've been around for more than five years now. Our creation dates back to 2015 and since then we've maintained a history of very strong growth, as our turnover has consistently doubled every year. There are twenty-seven of us today, and we're recruiting even more! We sell our products through varying distribution channels: our own permanent shops, and pop-up stores. At the moment we have two permanent shops and more than ten temporary sales points. In addition, we have many independent retailers, and you can also find our products purchasable via our website.

CSR is at the heart of our strategy, but we don't talk about it much because we don't see it as a way to get ahead of others. For us it's a prerequisite for good business. In today's world, if you don't have a conscience for the environment and CSR, you won't get anywhere in the business world! For us, our starting point for getting involved with the environment appeared to be the measurement of our carbon footprint. If you don't have that first audit, you won't know where to start.

Why Greenly? 🌱

We chose Greenly due to their fast approach to automate information. Today, it's a bit of a jungle when it comes to CSR, it's very old school, not very precise, and usually tedious. Greenly makes it very easy to match your bank accounts, to centralize all your purchases and to produce a reliable carbon footprint quickly. We didn't want to work with a consulting firm that would have spent three months manually going through each of our invoices for a result that wasn't necessarily reliable.

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It's not a surprise to us at first, but the upstream production accounts for the vast majority of our carbon footprint. What we didn't expect was the individual impact we have as employees at the office. We realized that this represented less than 1% of CABAÏA's carbon footprint! Another surprise is that freight represents a rather small part of our emissions. Bringing our products from far away, whether from Europe or China, the impact of transport is not huge. Where there is a real difference is in the manufacture of the product and the fact that the country itself has little or very high carbon emissions. A Chinese factory will therefore have a much greater carbon impact than a French factory, which we had not considered!

We discovered that we don't have to focus much energy on altering our office habits if we want to significantly reduce CABAÏA's carbon footprint. On the other hand, raising awareness is important, and individual commitments to reduce emissions can become a great victory on a global scale. With Greenly, our employees receive a newsletter with quizzes and information on the subject; this is the educational part of the support they offer. Our problem is that producing in Portugal doubles the selling price for the end consumer, which is not at all in keeping with the spirit of CABAÏA. So we are in the process of launching a complex project to simplify the production process, repatriate part of it, and try to mix know-how in different countries.