Blog 5: An insight into H&M

Welcome back, Conscious Consumers 🪴🪴🪴

Today, the blog will shine light on the fast fashion company H&M. I am sure all of us are aware of this high street store and would say that H&M is popular in keeping up to the latest fashion trends. 

H&M is worth 235.60 billion pounds therefore, emphasising the success of the company in the last 10 years. According to the Fashion Transparency index 2023, H&M scored 71% placing them 6th place out of the 250 companies that was reviewed. 

H&M has done a lot over the last few years to increase their sustainability and transparency to their consumers. On their website, they have a section on the top right dedicated to the companies sustainability. 

This section, discusses H&M work. All look's good right! 👀👀👀 

So what is wrong? 

Why is H&M even being discussed in this blog? 

Have you heard of H&M's Conscious line? (think there targeting us right). It's an labelling scheme created by H&M to target eco-friendly ehnthusiastics like myself. 

So what is the Conscious Collection? 

According to H&M website: 

We also have Conscious choice: pieces created with a little extra consideration for the planet. Each Conscious choice product contains at least 50% of more sustainable materials — like organic cotton or recycled polyester — but many contain a lot more than that. The only exception is recycled cotton where we accept a level of at least 20%. The quality of recycled cotton makes it tricky to include a higher amount. But we're hoping to change that! With new technological solutions and innovations, we're continually working to make our range even more sustainable.

Conscious choice can be found across all our departments, all year round. Just look for the green hangtag! 

Sounds Amazing, Right? 🤩

But how can a fast-fashion company be sustainable? Does this work? 

In June 2021, H&M's conscious line was found to contain a higher percentage of damaging un eco-friendly synthetic materials in comparison to the companies main clothing line. H&M was rated the worst offender of this out of all the fast-fashion stores by having a score of 96% therefore, showing they were lying and greenwashing conscious consumers like us!!! (Truna et al., 2023). 

H&M reported that over 90% of it's recycled polyester comes from single-use plastic bottles. But this was also found to be FALSE! and the company was only doing this to greenwashing us poor consumers to think that they are great!! 😖 (This makes me very angry). Even, if this was in the slightest bit TRUE then these plastics, do not stop the much bigger issue of micro-plastics that are shed during the clothing production which are polluting to the air, ocean and the food we consume. 

So what happened did H&M marketers go to jail for lying? 

Of course, not. The company ended up being taken to court for misleading consumers and in fact, the lawsuit ended up being dropped as H&M never said they were 'sustainable' just being 'conscious'.

 Although, this did impact consumer's perception of the conscious range and some consumers, are still more aware of the Greenwashing that major companies do. 

So what is H&M doing to rebuild their consumers? 

From exploring H&M website today, i have noticed that the company is now doing a 'rental' scheme for consumers that are H&M members to rent outfits and then return them. This is a really good sign for H&M as really sustainable companies should be encourage shoppers to buy less and waste less and not think about their profit but the environment 🤩🪴. 

They are following other retailers such as Decathlon by implementing the rent scheme. Click here to find out what Decathlon has been up to! 

Want to hear more about Greenwashing scandals? 

Click here to find out about Zara.