Circularity – Luxury industry: Start-up founded by young Tunisian wins Grand Prix for Innovation from French group LVMH

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The start-up "Save Your Wardrobe", founded by a young Tunisian woman, Hasna Kourda, and based on a logic of circularity and sustainability, has won the Grand Prix of the 7th edition of the "LVMH Innovation Award", at a ceremony held at Paris Expo Porte de Versailles. The start-up, which so far has branches in London, Tunis and Lisbon, will benefit from personalised support at the group's accelerator "La Maison des Startups LVMH", based at the start-up campus at Station F (Paris), according to the group's website. More than 1,300 start-ups from 75 countries applied for the prize, including more than 250 in the sustainable development and Greentech category, according to the French group, which is now one of the world's leading luxury goods companies. After an initial selection, 18 start-ups whose solutions have the potential to shape the future of the luxury industry were chosen to be present in the LVMH "Dream Box" pavilion at VivaTech. At the end of the deliberations, "Save Your Wardrobe" was awarded the Grand Prix of the LVMH Innovation Award, alongside five other winners, as well as a special prize dedicated to Data and Artificial Intelligence. "Save Your Wardrobe joins the prestigious list of Grand Prize winners of the LVMH Innovation Award who have all had an exemplary career within the Group, contributing to making our houses ever more desirable and offering the most memorable experiences. Save Your Wardrobe also perfectly illustrates our ambition for creative circularity, a pillar of our LIFE 360 environmental roadmap. I am convinced that their solution will very quickly resonate with the aspirations of our Houses and the expectations of our customers," says Bernard Arnault, Chairman and CEO of the LVMH Group. "The LVMH Innovation Award represents excellence, ingenuity and avant-gardism. Winning it, amongst so many exceptional entrepreneurs, is testament to the unique value that Save Your Wardrobe brings to the world of fashion and luxury. This is an essential step in our adventure, which will fuel our determination to push back the boundaries of the luxury experience even further, while preserving and extending the heritage of the LVMH Group's Houses," says Hasna Kourda, founder and CEO of the award-winning start-up. The young company offers an end-to-end digital service for maintaining, repairing and managing your wardrobe. In doing so, it increases the durability of its users' wardrobes. Having grown up in a family in Djerba that believes in the adage "nothing is lost, everything is transformed", and having studied economics and finance in France, Hasna Kourda, who currently lives in London, dreamed of combining business with pleasure and making the fashion sector more responsible and sustainable by adopting the concept of recycling and recovery. The textile sector is perceived as a polluting one, with thousands of tonnes of unsold textiles and clothing either disposed of in environmentally harmful ways (incineration, etc.) or thrown away in landfill sites, to no avail, every year. To this end, "the idea is to encourage fashion and shopping enthusiasts to reuse their clothes instead of buying new ones, which end up in landfill sites after a short time, polluting the planet even further", Hasna Kourda told TAP. This online service is "a way of reducing the pollution caused by the fast fashion sector and making consumer behaviour more responsible and more civic-minded", she believes.

Source: Agence Tunis Afrique Presse

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