At Vegan Fashion Repository, we keep our ears firmly to the ground for every essential development in the vegan and sustainable fashion industry, and celebrate when another milestone is reached.
Here’s a summary of the highlights from May 2025:
Amid ongoing uncertainty regarding U.S. tariffs, the digital wholesale platform Joor has published a report based on a tariff survey conducted back in April 2025. According to the findings, 85% of global fashion brands and retailers expect to raise prices by an average of 20% in response to the new U.S. trade tariffs. Meanwhile, 54% of U.S. brands have no intention of altering their supply chains to increase domestic production in light of the tariffs. In related news, French fashion companies, including Hermès, Kering, and LVMH, are taking action to manage rising tariffs through price hikes, production shifts, and cost-cutting measures to protect their margins. On another front, the BGMEA (Bangladesh Garment Manufacturers and Exporters Association) has confirmed an initiative to pilot a blockchain-enabled Digital Product Passport (DPP) system to strengthen Bangladesh’s competitiveness in the global—particularly European—market, with an emphasis on transparency and sustainability. Just-Style, AFP, Apparel Resources
Circular Fashion Economy
As sustainability and circularity become mandatory components of fashion businesses across Europe, major fashion players are increasingly engaging with innovations to meet sustainability targets. LVMH’s La Maison des Startups protégé, Sparxell, the pioneer of the world’s first 100% plant-based colourant, has secured a grant of €1.9 million from the European Innovation Council. The grant will support its mission to transform the $48 billion global colourants market with high-performance, biodegradable alternatives to synthetic dyes. Meanwhile, Kering has unveiled a new water strategy aiming for a net-positive impact on water by 2050, prioritising materials that ease pressure on water sources. The H&M Foundation has announced the winners of the Global Change Awards 2025, which supports early-stage innovators working to transform the textile industry. The winning ventures include: Decorpet, Thermo Cyclones, PulpaTronics, Loom, CircularFabrics, A Blunt Story, Brilliant Dyes, Decarbonisation Lab, Renasens, and The Revival Circularity Lab. Each winner will receive a €200,000 grant and join the GCA Changemaker Programme. The Industry.Fashion, Kering, H&M Foundation
In a similar push towards circularity, Decathlon, eBay, John Lewis & Partners, and Tapestry are the latest brands to commit to Fashion Remodel, an initiative by the Ellen MacArthur Foundation to drive circular business models within the fashion industry, while YKK is now sourcing low-carbon aluminium for its zippers as part of its pledge to achieve climate neutrality by 2050. Just-Style, Apparel Resources
This month also saw a flurry of ‘first recycling plant’ announcements. U.S. textile recycling firm Circ® has received backing from the French government and the European Union to build a $500 million (€450 million) plant in France, which will be the world’s first to recover cotton and polyester on an industrial scale. Located in Saint-Avold in northeast France, the facility is expected to begin operations in 2028, with a capacity of 70,000 metric tonnes per year and will create 200 jobs. In similar news, DePoly, a Switzerland-based advanced recycler of PET and polyester plastics, has announced the upcoming launch of a 500-tonne-per-year pilot plant in Monthey. German pioneer Eeden has raised €18 million to build a demonstration plant in Münster, scaling its chemical process to recover cellulose and PET building blocks from cotton-polyester blends. Meanwhile, Australian biotech firm Samsara Eco has partnered with engineering giant KBR to build the world’s first enzymatic recycling plant for Nylon 6.6—a notoriously difficult-to-recycle plastic used in textiles and automotive parts. The production site will be located in Southeast Asia and is expected to be operational by 2027. Reuters, Apparel Insider, Innovation in Textiles , Just-Style
Metaverse and Gaming
Roblox is now offering tools to design “shopping experiences” that allow users to purchase physical products from creators directly within games. This practice has already been adopted by brands such as The Weeknd and Fenty Beauty— the former offering a ticket to the Hurry Up Tomorrow movie in a package with a digital gadget, and the latter releasing a new shade of Gloss Bomb lip gloss within its Roblox experience. With nearly 100 million users on Roblox daily, this strategy is becoming difficult for brands to ignore. In related news, 86 million U.S. residents have already made purchases during live shopping broadcasts. The value of the American live commerce market is expected to grow to $68 billion by 2026, according to Savings.com. TikTok Live currently leads the space (29%), followed by Facebook Live (19%), Instagram Live (16%), and QVC and HSN (14% each). While around 60% of adult Americans have watched live shopping broadcasts, only 8% do so regularly, yet a third of viewers go on to make purchases. Roblox, Retail Dive Savings
Google has also released Veo 3, its latest video and audio generation model, boasting extreme realism. It is expected not only to serve as a creative tool but also to attract new users. For reference, OpenAI’s ChatGPT gained one million users in an hour during the recent “Ghibli” craze. Google’s Gemini app now boasts 400 million monthly active users, with its AI tools processing over 480 trillion tokens a month—up from 9.7 trillion the previous year. Blog.Google
AI and Shopping
Sophia Kianni and Phoebe Gates (daughter of Bill Gates) have launched Phia, an AI-powered platform that helps shoppers find the best deals on both new and second-hand goods. NY Post
OpenAI has announced updates to the shopping experience within ChatGPT. Users searching for fashion, beauty, homeware, or electronics will now receive personalised recommendations, visual product details, price comparisons, reviews, and direct links to buy—without being served ads. Google has similarly introduced a suite of AI shopping tools that allow users to ask detailed questions (e.g., what to wear for a wedding or which items pair well together), receiving complex answers, advice, and product suggestions. Users can continue asking follow-up questions until they’re satisfied. This new feature is expected to roll out to U.S. users in the coming weeks. This is particularly important given that, according to BrightEdge, longer, complex search queries have increased by 49% in AI Overviews since May 2024, while traditional ranking-style and comparison queries have dropped by 60% and 14%, respectively. Vogue Business, Business of Fashion, BrightEdge
The statistics for AI-assisted shopping in the UK are in. Based on actual online transaction data, Adobe Analytics reports that traffic to UK retail websites from AI and generative AI sources grew by 20% compared to February—and by 790% since August 2024. UK consumers spent £26.2 billion online in Q1 2025, including £8.8 billion in March alone—a 3.5% year-on-year increase, with notable growth in sales of summer dresses. To illustrate just how significant this is, spending on outdoor goods in March 2024 rose by ‘only’ 56% compared to February—March 2025 has far exceeded that. FashionUnited
Last but by no means least, a heartfelt thank you for all the amazing support you’ve shown for the Vegan Fashion Repository’s open content release. It truly means a lot. Seeing the positive response has reassured us that making this knowledge freely available to support the growing cruelty-free fashion movement was absolutely the right call.
Cheers to that—and to everything still to come!