"Grateful and very proud to have been asked to be one of the speakers on the topic of 'Sustainability' at the Retail Tech Expo 2022. I spoke about sustainability from an entrepreneurial perspective and about 'Why sustainability issues are an important part both as a guiding principle and from a branding perspective for us at Ipomia,' says Cecilia Kadar.
In the picture Moderator Annika Guldroth, IT Media Group, Cecilia Kadar, Ipomia, and Linda Fragner, Sustainability sprint, who talked about how to facilitate & create effective idea generation workshops, which she has also compiled in a book that will be released shortly. Ahead of Retail Tech, IT media group interviewed Cecilia about her and Ipomia's thoughts on what sustainability actually means for Ipomia.
In the interview preceding this, Cecilia says, among other things, that 'With Ipomia, I wanted to make as small an impact as possible. Sure, it's very easy to buy very cheap products from China, but then you have, among other things, the world's longest transport distance, etc. There are very many aspects that one wants to keep track of oneself. We decided very early on that we wanted products that we can stand for, among other things, from a quality perspective and an environmental perspective.
All our production takes place within Europe and its vicinity, which has been an important part for us. We were actually one of the first to start working with bamboo. The reason we chose bamboo was precisely because it does not consume as much water, it is a much softer material (same properties as silk), and it breathes much more. We also looked at bamboo from a medical perspective, for example, that it should not grow bacteria.
As soon as you start looking at all perspectives, the circle starts to get bigger and bigger. We want this to be a guiding principle, that we think and analyze every step of the process. We also looked at the project from a gender equality perspective; we really wanted to listen and do something for these women during their healing process.
Another aspect that we have encountered (especially in a startup era) is that everything should go so fast! We often heard the question of why we haven't come much further? For me, it is more important to grow slowly and create an economically sustainable growth phase where we, to a greater extent, not only accelerate – but it simply takes its time.
If you want to read the full interview, it's available here (in Swedish ;)) https://it-retail.se/intervju-cecilia-kadar-ipomia/
