What is the ROI of the Waro tool for the purchasing and product departments of fashion brands?
Benjamin THOMAS
August 28, 2025
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Climate change is no longer just a CSR issue. It is becoming a global strategic issue for fashion brands:
But above all, for the Purchasing and Product departments, this transformation takes on an operational dimension. Why?
Because the real levers for decarbonization are in their hands:
product composition, choice of materials, sourcing strategy, volumes, logistics.
In other words:
Decarbonizing means transforming the way we design and buy. And it directly involves business teams.
But to do this effectively - without burdening processes or degrading performance - you need tools that are adapted to the challenges they face.
👉 That's where the ROI of a tool like Waro is to enable purchasing and product teams to manage impact as a business indicator, in the service of overall performance.
All too often, companies approach the climate transition as a "separate" issue, unconnected with operational imperatives. Yet failure to structure an impact strategy today means accumulating risks for tomorrow:
The production basins most used by the fashion industry are already subject to increasing uncertainties - climatic, geopolitical, logistical or regulatory. Tomorrow, only suppliers who have anticipated these transformations will be able to meet brand specifications. Sourcing will become tighter, and mistakes in anticipation will be costly.
Internally, the lack of appropriate tools means that climate strategy is totally abstract for teams. Purchasing or product design decisions are then taken blindly, with insufficient, poorly consolidated or even contradictory data. The result: lost margins, increased complexity, overload for CSR teams who have to act as the "link" with business teams.
What this means in concrete terms:
➡️ Purchasing and product departments will soon be unable to manage without integrating impact data.
Traditionally, the purchasing function is driven by three priorities: margin, time-to-market and quality of execution. Environmental impact often comes last, if at all. However, market realities are changing rapidly.
Purchasing departments must now secure their supply chain in an unstable environment. They need to identify the right suppliers, those able to produce with low-impact materials, with traceable processes, and in compliance with growing environmental standards. All this without compromising budgetary and operational imperatives.
This challenge is made all the greater by the fact that the data needed to make these trade-offs is often fragmented, incomplete or non-existent. Many decisions are still made on the basis of Excel, intuition or historical habits.
Waro turns complexity into control. Using granular data on suppliers, materials, countries or factories, the platform identifies items with a high environmental impact. It can also simulate several purchasing scenarios - comparing, for example, two suppliers with equivalent costs, but with a significant impact differential.
Beyond analysis, Waro helps build a clear purchasing strategy, aligned with the brand's overall objectives. This plan can be tracked over time, shared with teams, and connected to existing tools (ERP, PIM...), reducing the manual workload.
For collections teams, the dilemma is often: how to reconcile creativity, desirability and environmental performance? Too often, eco-design comes too late, in the form of corrections or adjustments after the collections have been finalized. This considerably reduces its effectiveness - and relevance.
Product managers need to be able to anticipate. To have clear guidelines. They need to know, right from the briefing phase, which materials to avoid or favor, what trade-offs are possible, and what the major impact risks are.
This is precisely what Waro enables them to do. By analyzing previous collections, the platform identifies the biggest emission sources. It then provides simple, actionable data on future collections, with the ability to simulate alternatives in just a few clicks: change a material, choose another supplier, adjust a mix... and immediately visualize the environmental impact.
In this way, each product manager can monitor his or her own indicators, understand his or her room for manoeuvre, and act in line with a shared objective. It also reduces internal back-and-forth, reinforces coordination with the CSR department, and justifies arbitration with management.
The first to have to apply impact reduction targets are often the operational teams: product managers, buyers. Yet they are also often the most ill-equipped. Their feedback is clear: they don't always know what's expected of them, don't understand the meaning of CSR indicators, and are sometimes under contradictory pressure between commercial objectives and environmental expectations.
The key to mobilizing these teams lies in pedagogy and the choice of the right tool. Waro enables business teams to clearly visualize the impact of their choices, to simulate several eco-design scenarios, and to act autonomously.
The platform offers a simple interface, with customized dashboards according to each person's role, enabling them to track their own KPIs: impact by range, progress by season, level of contribution to brand objectives. An expert consultant assists teams in this process, helping them to integrate eco-design into their day-to-day operations, so that impact becomes a new operational decision-making criterion.
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