Chanel Recycling platform and the importance of supply chain solutions
Jun 18, 2025
3
min reading
Chanel’s Nevold and the Rise of Supply Chain Innovation in Luxury Fashion
The climate crisis is no longer a distant headline and we are finally seeing the fashion industry paying attention to it on a smart and innovative way.
Recent happenings have shown extreme weather destabilizing cotton supply. Traceability laws are tightening across continents.
Resource scarcity and unsold stock are no longer back-office issues – they’re boardroom priorities. And for the first time, even legacy luxury players are admitting it: the system is cracking.
We’ve –finally– entered a moment of reckoning.
The environmental cost of doing business as usual is no longer acceptable, and neither is the financial risk. Core materials like wool, silk, and leather are now flagged as “at risk” by sustainability indexes and investor groups alike.
Brands that once treated sustainability as an accessory are being forced to confront it as infrastructure.
Which is why what happened earlier this June made headlines.
Chanel quietly unveiled a new textile recycling platform: Nevold.
Nevold (short for Never Old) is more than just a name. It’s a signal. A shift away from destruction, overproduction, and opacity. And a pivot toward system-level solutions the industry can no longer postpone.
At Chanel, we didn’t destroy unsold products. But we also didn’t yet have a real system to understand their full potential.
— Bruno Pavlovsky, President of Fashion at Chanel and Chanel SAS, via Vogue Business
This isn’t resale. It isn’t deadstock drop culture. It’s infrastructure.
As The Cirkel put it: “Nevold isn’t just a side project. It’s Chanel preparing for a future where nothing—not even luxury—can afford to be thrown away.”
But let’s be clear: Nevold is not the solution. It’s one piece of it.
The future of fashion will depend on a network of connected strategies – spanning fibers, sourcing models, verification tools, traceability systems, and circular infrastructure. No single platform, product, or brand can transform this industry alone.
That’s why at World Collective, we’re building the connective tissue—an ecosystem that brings together certified materials, pioneering suppliers, next-gen technologies, and the partners ready to move the system forward.
So keep reading. In this article, we unpack why Nevold marks a meaningful shift—and how it fits into the bigger picture of where sourcing, circularity, and supply chain strategy must go next.
Why ‘Nevold’ Isn’t Just Another Circularity Project
According to WWD, Nevold will work as “an umbrella of Chanel investments including L’Atelier des Matières”—a separate company launched by Chanel in 2019, focused on disassembling end-of-life products, sorting materials, and giving them a second life.
Photo credit: ©L'Atelier des Matières
Nevold will also include:
Filatures du Parc →A French yarn maker known for using recycled fibers.
Authentic Material → A company that transforms waste (like leather scraps or shells) into high-end materials.
Top universities → Collaborations with institutions like University of Cambridge and Politecnico di Milano to push R&D even further.
That is to say: Chanel built a project meant to lay the foundation for all of that. But what actually sets it apart?
While these and other existing programs focus more on resale, rental, or upcycling finished products (like repairing or reselling used clothes)—operating at the end of a product’s life—Chanel’s Nevold goes much earlier, deep into how products are made.
Its work centres on components, not products—developing hybrid materials that combine recycled and virgin content to meet the technical standards of luxury manufacturing.
Instead of working on finished clothes or bags, Nevold focuses on the hidden parts that go into making them: the threads, linings, internal supports, and structural components—things most people never see, but that matter for performance and longevity.
So how does this work in practice? Vogue Business highlighted a few examples:
Tweed with recycled thread: Chanel has been exploring the integration of recycled materials into its iconic tweeds for ya while. With Nevold, those experiments take on a more formal structure.
Recycled leather for structure: The brand has long tested ways to replace plastic in the structural components of bags and shoes. Now, with the new hub, recycled leather waste is being developed as a viable alternative to maintain strength without relying on virgin plastic.
Heels with recycled content: Projects to reengineer products like the slingback heel using recycled composites have been underway for some time. With the new initiative, those tests are moving toward implementation, targeting up to 50% less plastic in some styles.
This shows that Nevold is a more technical and deeper approach to circularity—starting with how fashion is built from the inside out.
The B2B Innovation on the Rise
Another spark in Chanel’s innovation is that, while high-end fashion houses have traditionally guarded their innovations closely, Nevold signals a shift—one that opens the door (even slightly) to collective progress.
The goal? For Nevold to become a business-to-business platform, offering other brands access to its tools, processes, and partnerships. In practice, that could mean:
Access to hybrid materials → Other brands could use Nevold’s pre-developed, luxury-grade materials that blend recycled and virgin inputs.
Product dismantling via L’Atelier des Matières → Brands could send unsold or end-of-life stock to be disassembled and sorted by material for reuse.
Collaboration with material specialists → Opportunities to co-develop new solutions with partners like Authentic Material or Filatures du Parc.
Academic partnerships → Shared access to top-tier R&D through institutions, especially valuable for testing, performance, or lifecycle data.
This kind of B2B model turns sustainability from a solo effort into shared infrastructure—making technical circularity more accessible across the industry, not just within closed-loop systems.
A Focus Fashion Should’ve Prioritized Sooner: Supply Chain Solutions
For too long, sustainability in fashion has been handled at the surface level, mostly focused on the downstream side of the supply chain, where most of the environmental damage has already been done.
Efforts like resale platforms, take-back programs, and recycling campaigns have their place, but they deal with the aftermath, not the root.
The reality is: true transformation doesn’t start at the end. It starts at the foundation.
And that foundation is the supply chain, from the very first fiber to the final stitch. It involves every stakeholder and every stage, not just post-production fixes but upstream systems that define how fashion is made in the first place.
That work begins with choices around materials, components, and manufacturing systems—but it’s also embedded in the relationships between designers, mills, manufacturers, and suppliers. Traceability, circularity, and shared accountability must be woven in from the beginning—not layered on later as damage control.
Because at its core, this is a systems problem, which means building infrastructure and treating supply chain innovation as the baseline for any credible sustainability strategy rather then a side initiative.
This is where real impact begins. And where meaningful, scalable change can finally take root.
World Collective: Building What the Industry Needs Next
According to Fashion Sustainability Directory: “Traceability technologies, including physical and digital methods, are becoming increasingly important tools for verifying material origins and tracking their journey through complex global supply chains”.
At World Collective, this has always been the starting point. Our work has been grounded in the belief that sustainable fashion can’t scale without intelligent supply chains, and that small businesses and small suppliers—who are too often left out of the equation—deserve access to the same quality of tools, partners, and systems as the industry’s largest players.
Our goal is to translate what real circularity in fashion means into real resources, building the infrastructure that allows all fashion stakeholders to play the same game into transforming the supply chain.
That’s why World Collective is not only a marketplace for smarter textile selling and sourcing.
It’s the foundation of a digital ecosystem in progress—one designed to serve designers, sourcing leads, manufacturers, mills and every fashion players who are ready to make more transparent decisions.
And while our full ecosystem is still unfolding, our global marketplace is already live and in motion.
Through it, emerging brands and suppliers can:
Browse verified, global suppliers in one place
Access real-time product specs and certifications
Source authentic, low-impact textiles with traceability
Order samples and place orders without large MOQs
Explore a wide range of price points and material categories—from organic cotton to COBOO leather (and much more).
Move faster, with fewer barriers and more trust
Two Different Models, One Shared Direction
What we’re building mirrors what Chanel is signaling:
→ That transparency and performance aren’t a tradeoff.
→ That supply chains can be a place for innovation, not just logistics.
→ And that collaboration—real, operational collaboration—is where fashion’s future starts.
Chanel’s Nevold initiative and World Collective’s ecosystem may differ in scope—but at their core, they’re answering the same call.
They’re both signals that fashion can’t keep patching the system from the outside, because the work that matters also happens upstream.
Read more about the importance of circularity, traceability and of the collective effort in the supply chain towards a better future for fashion:
Rethinking B2B Textile Sourcing: What the Industry Needs Now
2025 Fashion Statistics: Insights for Strategic, Sustainable, and Connected Industry
Smarter Supply Chains Start Here: Inside World Collective’s Ecosyste
Written by Maria Eugênia Lima, Content & Marketing Intern at World Collective
