May 27, 2025 / By Melissa McClements
In the second interview in our series with sustainability leaders from the technology, aviation, travel, tourism, retail and hospitality sectors, we talk to Lidia Lüttin, head of marketing at Carbonfact, a tech startup offering the world’s only carbon data management platform specifically for the fashion industry.
“Carbon is a data problem. What you don’t measure, you can’t reduce,” said Lidia Lüttin, head of marketing at Carbonfact. On a mission to decarbonize the fashion industry, the tech startup helps brands and their suppliers streamline their environmental data. This enables them to report against ESG regulations, and understand their emissions hotspots, so they can put together a practical plan to reduce their carbon footprint.
Fashion’s carbon challenge
Accounting for between 4% and 10% of global greenhouse gas emissions, the apparel and footwear sector is a massive driver of climate change. However, quantifying the emissions created by a garment, a pair of shoes or a fashion collection is notoriously complicated. Each item often incorporates textiles and fixtures from a range of producers and factories around the world. Brands consequently struggle to have a granular understanding of the emissions produced by every part of their supply chains, so they don’t know how and where to reduce them.
"The biggest problem when apparel and footwear brands want to measure their carbon footprint is that they have data stored in unstructured ways, in many different places,” said Lüttin. “For example, they use a Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) system or an Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) system, plus a lot of spreadsheets. Everything is scattered all over the place, and it’s almost impossible for them to manually match the different pieces of the product data that they need to calculate an environmental footprint and do a life cycle assessment.
“For a single garment, they might need up to 100 data points—including its overall weight, the thickness of the yarn and the source of the raw materials used to make the textiles and components. That’s what we do for our clients. Our team of data scientists either pulls a brand’s sustainability data directly from its PLM or ERP, or they go through all their spreadsheets, to normalize it by organizing it all into a standard format and correcting errors.”
From consumer-facing to B2B
Carbonfact was founded in 2021 by three Frenchmen: former venture capitalist Marc Laurent, Airbnb lead data scientist Martin Daniel and JobTeaser CTO Romain Champourlier, who wanted to set up a business dedicated to saving the planet. They pinpointed fashion as their sector of choice, due to its high emissions. The three entrepreneurs knew that generic carbon management tools were not the answer to fashion’s unique data challenges.
Their initial focus was on consumers. “Originally, Carbonfact was designed as a platform for consumers to understand the carbon footprint of their clothes and footwear,” said Lüttin. “But when the first platform was tested, it showed that most consumers still don’t factor in environmental considerations when making fashion purchases. That was when our founders decided to pivot the business towards the fashion brands themselves.”
The company has since gained over 150 customers—including outdoor wear specialists The North Face, sportswear brand On, U.S. eco brand Allbirds, French fashion house A.P.C., German sustainable fashion company ARMEDANGELS, U.S. work wear brand Carhartt and designer label Marc O’Polo. Its platform undertakes over 100,000 product lifecycle assessments each week.
More than just measuring
Carbonfact’s platform does much more than collate and organize data. “We enrich the data by adding extra information from our proprietary database to make it more accurate and valuable,” said Lüttin. This is because primary data is a big problem across the industry, and most companies only have a limited set of datasets about their own products.”
The database is now so comprehensive that it also offers a set of heuristics, which are akin to ‘rules of thumb’ relating to specific products. For instance, it knows the weight of a pair of jeans with a certain specification or understands that a pair of boots weighing over a certain amount must be made from leather.
To enable sourcing teams to make environmentally responsible decisions in the future, Carbonfact also offers a unique eco-design tool. For example, the team at lingerie brand Adore Me, a sister brand of Victoria’s Secret, used it to compare the projected emissions released by the production of their upcoming collection in different parts of the world, causing them to change the manufacturing location, cutting the collection’s overall emissions by 12%.
Constant evolution
The nature of Carbonfact’s database means it’s constantly growing and developing. In response to customer demand, the tech specialists keep adding new features, the most recent of which is related to factories.
As Lüttin explained, “Basically, it provides a view of all factories in all tiers, so brands can see the environmental impact of each one and use that data to build a practical decarbonization strategy—for example, by helping a key supplier move away from coal-based heating and invest in renewables. This is our pragmatic approach. We don’t just measure and organize data. We ensure it’s actionable.”
To learn more about Carbonfact and its impact on the fashion industry, visit carbonfact.com
Read the previous installment of the Sustainability Leadership Series with ClimateTrade, a blockchain-based marketplace for carbon credits, here: Using Cryptocurrency Technology for Climate Action.
