Early Impact: Meet Ettos, a startup bringing transparency to fashion

Sustainability has been in vogue for the fashion industry for many years, but the industry still struggles to reduce its environmental impact.

Among the many climate concerns in fashion is the supply chain. Clothing is sourced from all over the world, with the emissions associated with getting goods from A to B a significant contributor to global emissions.  emissions producing high volumes of waste.

According to the United Nations Environment Programme, the fashion industry produces up to 10% of the world’s carbon dioxide output.

Ettos, a startup based in Nottingham, is trying to bring transparency to fashion. The company was founded by brother and sister team Gianni Romano and Adriana Batty as a way for fashion brands to better understand and display the impact of their supply chain.

“We’ve experienced first-hand how difficult it is to actually trace garments back to source, particularly at a bigger a bigger scale,” Gianni Romano, co-founder of Ettos told UKTN.

Ettos is a software-as-a-service (SaaS) tool for fashion brands looking to get a better understanding of their suppliers. Clients pay a subscription fee to access the platform which is then incorporated into its supply chain.

“In effect, they’re mimicking their core ordering system, and those orders get passed on to their suppliers, and then they get passed on through a chain of assignment in a similar way,” Romano explained.

By logging the information from all the links of the supply chain, fashion brands can be held more accountable for maintaining their climate targets.

Many companies in the industry regularly make climate pledges as part of their environmental, social and governance (ESG) claims.

The Ettos team claims that by encouraging visibility and providing fashion companies with clear information on their supply chain, there will be greater motivation and ability to prove that they are compliant with net zero targets.

Romano and Batty created Ettos initially as a software tool within a separate company they run, a clothing-sourcing company called Lyfcycle.

“Through Lyfcycle, we had created an app that was essentially to help brands with the journey of their products, similar to what Ettos does but it was a much more simple system.”

As Lyfcycle continued to work with fashion brands, the founding team decided to put their software towards encouraging transparency among their clients.

While the primary service supports internal ESG monitoring for fashion companies, Ettos also allows firms to highlight this information for consumers.

“If you are shopping with a brand that is using Ettos, you get to make more informed choices in your purchase because you can see where my clothes have come from.”

Romano said that consumers will gain an understanding of what has gone into the garment they are buying, from the climate certifications of the factories to the places it has been shipped.

The Ettos platform launched earlier this month and will initially focus on brands that have worked with Lyfcycle, before branching out to the wider fashion industry.

Early Impact is a monthly UKTN series profiling early-stage startups that are solving societal problems.