Swedish fashion brand introduces new kind of receipt to help curb emissions

Asket, which was founded in Stockholm in 2015 by August Bard-Bringéus and Jakob Dworsky with a mission to end overconsumption and restore value to the apparel industry, combats the wastefulness of seasonal collections that fuel fast-consumption habits by having a single, permanent collection designed to last for years.

In its latest attempt to improve customer awareness of the planetary impact of their choices, Asket will now issue two receipts with every purchase – a regular transaction receipt as well as an impact receipt. The impact receipt will break down the environmental impact and cost of every Asket order, detailing the CO2 emissions, water usage and energy consumption required to make every garment, as well as the impact associated with the packaging and shipping choices.

The data is also available on each garment’s product page as part of the brand’s transparency module, which provides full supply chain traceability and cost breakdown.

• What’s next for communicating sustainability in fashion?

By showing customers the resources that have been extracted, used and emitted to make their clothes possible, Asket’s head of marketing Sarah Arts tells The Drum, it hopes to re-establish the garment’s true value as well as allow them to track their habits within the contexts of their lifestyles.

“The aim is to encourage not only ourselves but also our customers and the industry as a whole to think about the environmental debt we’re creating. But more than just disclosing information, we want to help people keep track of their consumption-based footprint,” she says.

“We can’t shop our way to sustainability,” says Arts, stressing that every item has an impact, no matter how well made or marketed it is. “With the impact receipt, we’re asking our customers to not only acknowledge the impact of their purchasing decision but ultimately to also make concessions to their consumption.”

Arts believes that, once consumers are more aware of their footprint and how it sits in the global context, they can begin to adjust habits: “From buying less to honoring the lifetime value inherent in each garment, once there is a broad scale realization that the way and the rate at which we consume clothing is incompatible with a thriving planet, we will start to see change.”

She says this is evidenced by the success Asket has already had as a result of previous transparency initiatives. “We’ve seen that campaigns such as ‘Full Traceability’ and our ‘Black Friday Shutdown’ have been well received. We notice that people spend more time on these web pages compared with the average site time, so our work goes some way in educating our customers. We’ve also noticed an uptick in customers visiting garment care pages during these times. As a privately owned, independent company, we don’t operate for short-term gains. We want to contribute to something better.”

To inform consumers about its missions, Arts says that news of the impact receipt will be shared across Asket’s own channels, with further information on its website, supporting newsletters and social content, as well as a takeover in its Stockholm store with a 7-meter impact receipt installation. “We hope it will spark a conversation.”