It’s Tuesday, and today we are diving into Fairly Made, a French sustainable fashion startup. The company was founded by Laure Betsch and Camille Le Gal and recently completed a $16.4 Series B funding round led by BNP Paribas Solar Impulse Venture Fund, GET Fund, ETF Partners and Frenchfounders.

In the apparel industry, 80% of the environmental impact comes from the upstream supply chain—sourcing raw materials and transforming them into finished goods. However, only 34% of products are traceable to some extent, and just 17% are fully traceable.

Because brands usually don’t deal directly with factories and instead operate through middlemen, it’s very hard for them to trace a product’s story: how the raw material was collected, how it was processed, and how it was manufactured. Since the start of their journey, Laure and Camille visited over 250 factories to gain insight into how the clothes we wear are actually made—looking at everything from cotton collection to clothing dyeing.

Based on that knowledge, Fairly Made created a software product that helps brands manage their supply chain more sustainably and measure themselves against five criteria: environmental, social, traceability, recyclability, and sustainability. The platform has five main components.

Fairly Made helps brands not only understand where they stand in their sustainability journey but also figure out how to improve—and what’s blocking them from doing so.

Fairly Made plays a unique role in the apparel value chain: it helps brands uncover details about their own suppliers. It’s a bit puzzling when you think about it—if you’re buying office supplies from a company, you probably don’t need outside help just to answer the question: “Who exactly are the people we’re already working with?”

But such are the complexities of the industry—such is the chasm between design and actual physical production.

To close that chasm the biggest and the hardest thing that Fairly Made has to do is to collect data—both from brands and their suppliers.

When the brand comes in, the first thing that Fairly Made does is it collects information on who the brands’s suppliers are and what SKUs it produces. That’s the initial traceability data collected from the brand’s ERP and PLM systems. Fairly Made then surveys suppliers to cover blank spaces.

It may take 4–5 weeks to contact suppliers, explain why the project matters, and collect the necessary data. The further down the chain a supplier is, the harder the process becomes. Suppliers fill out two forms: a factory form (covering certifications, operational practices, and the origin and destination of materials), and a material form (detailing the materials used).

These questionnaires also capture information about the supplier’s own suppliers—allowing Fairly Made to dig as deep as possible into the supply chain.

And it doesn’t stop there. The next step is verification. Fairly Made checks the information internally and selectively visits suppliers to ensure they align with the company’s values and independently verify their certifications.

With all the data in place, the software calculates life-cycle metrics (CO₂, water, energy), plus social and recyclability scores for each SKU. The brand can then generate a consumer-facing digital passport and QR code.

Although Fairly Made is unique in many ways, this part is fairly standard.

The company offers a subscription to its platform, with pricing based on two factors: the type of plan selected and the number of SKUs being sold.

I usually don’t write about companies beyond Series A rounds, but I made an exception for this section alone—before I knew anything about the business.

We talk a lot about network effects in business, but not enough about network effects in cities—which are both local and global, embodied in the concept of global cities. I won’t bore you with theory (and there’s a lot of it), but the core idea is this:

So, what’s my point?

Fairly Made has offices in Paris and Milan—the two global capitals of the fashion industry, especially luxury fashion. Both cities have broader economic roles, but fashion is central to their identity.

The total market cap of public luxury groups headquartered in Paris or Milan is $561 billion, compared to just $94 billion for the rest of the world. Within those groups, 20 major brands are based in Paris or Milan, versus 16 elsewhere. That’s an extraordinary level of concentration.

Fairly Made taps into this by meeting clients where they are and hosting local events. 80–85% of Fairly Made’s clients are headquartered in Paris or Milan. Beyond this, the company participates in initiatives like Première Vision Paris, a sustainability-focused event for fashion professionals that gathered 34,000 attendees.

You almost never see a SaaS company where in-person sales are crucial. But every rule has an exception—and this is it.

Both French and European regulators are advancing traceability in fashion.

In 2023, a new law came into force in France requiring apparel and footwear brands to disclose, on their labels, the recycled content, recyclability, and any hazardous substances under EU REACH. Products containing more than 50% synthetic fibers must include a microplastic shedding warning. Labels must also note traceability details—such as the countries of origin for weaving, dyeing, printing, and assembly.

An EU-wide regulation will come into effect in 2026, requiring brands to provide digital product passports detailing each garment’s supply chain and recyclability. Although full enforcement begins in 2030, brands must begin preparing now.

And there are other legislative initiatives underway—part of a broader push toward greater transparency, sustainable practices, and reducing fashion’s environmental harm.

People want to believe that the future version of themselves will behave in the right, ethical, smart, and considerate way. This is especially true with sustainability. You can find dozens of surveys showing that people around the world claim they’re willing to pay more for sustainable products, switch to electric vehicles, save water, etc. But they don’t.

If they did, Chinese companies like Temu and Shein wouldn’t account for 10% of Meta’s revenue in 2023—with that share doubling in just two years.

Most of the brands I looked at that work with Fairly Made are luxury or luxury-adjacent. That’s not surprising. Luxury brands have higher margins, which gives them room to invest in making their supply chains more sustainable. Smaller or fast fashion brands don’t have that cushion.

Fast fashion is estimated to account for 10% of global carbon emissions. Changing that industry—or even just integrating with it—is going to be extremely difficult.

Fairly Made still can’t trace 100% of every item. Data gaps remain. And as the company grows and onboards more clients, those gaps could widen. Each new brand brings in thousands of new SKUs and upstream suppliers, multiplying the number of questionnaires, certifications, and manual validations. That creates operational challenges.

When you see a GORE‑TEX label on boots or a jacket, you know it means you won’t get wet or freeze. You may not know how it works—or even what it is—but you know the outcome. And that’s all that matters to the customer.

Fairly Made could be that for sustainability. A visible label that signals: “this item was produced responsibly.” We’re not there yet—the QR code still serves a more informational function—but you can see the path. Fairly Made could evolve from a platform into an ingredient brand.

What makes that future even more compelling is the potential for Fairly Made to go beyond sustainability. The company already provides a social score, but consumers can’t see it.

Showing that workers are paid a living wage, that there’s no child labor involved—that could build trust and explain why item A with a Fairly Made label is different from item B without one.

The more suppliers Fairly Made onboards, the more complete its view of the supply chain becomes. That improves value for current clients (higher switching costs) and attracts new ones (lower acquisition costs).

Every new client strengthens the dataset and makes the platform better. The flywheel spins faster.

You often read about the environmental impact of the apparel industry and develop a general sense of the damage it causes. But when I looked at specific items—produced by companies that actually care—it hit differently. One single dress I reviewed produced CO₂ emissions equivalent to 105.1 km driven by a passenger car and consumed 124.8 MJ of energy—enough to heat a medium-sized apartment for almost two days.

As a consumer, if you’re confronted with that information in the moment, at the store—what would you do? Put another way: if you went shopping on 10 different occasions for 10 different items, how many times would you reluctantly put something back solely because it was bad for the environment?

Most people, despite what they say in surveys, would buy the thing anyway.

But some won’t.

And, in a weird way, that will be a sign of Fairly Made’s true success. Because the best brands will start taking serious steps to improve their supply chains—even if it cuts into their margins. They’ll source better materials, ethically produced. And they’ll begin shaping how consumers think and act.

Those that stay the course, prioritizing short-term profits over long-term impact, will lose market share in the long run.

That would be fair.