“Today, brands must have purpose beyond profit, and leverage their reach and vitality to address global issues. Since Bally’s founding in 1851, it has honored a commitment to responsible business practices. Resulting from a baseline internal assessment conducted earlier this year, this ‘Sustainability Roadmap’ targets a series of milestones across key areas of our organization with the goal of reducing the company’s footprint. Along with the signing of the global Fashion Pact, we continue to embark on this challenging path towards social and environmental responsibility, joining forces with fellow industry leaders for change.”

-         Nicolas Girotto, Bally CEO

The time to act is now. At Bally, we believe our future is contingent on whether we can be a catalyst for positive change, reducing our impact on the environment, enforcing sustainability from the inside out, and claiming responsibility for our activities as a fashion business that impacts communities, customers, employees and the environment.

Our Strategy

Following an internal baseline assessment in 2019, we identified four sustainability pillars for our focus across the company: Transparency, Quality, Collaboration and Progress. By charting critical courses of action and setting short and long-term goals within these business areas, we aim to mitigate our environmental footprint and promote social and economic well-being in accordance with the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and The Fashion Pact, the latter of which Bally is a committed signatory.

As collaboration has always been one of our brand’s most enduring core values, we have chosen to share a summary of our Sustainability Roadmap in hopes of inspiring others. Join us in our ongoing commitment to being a more respectful and responsible business, for the mutual benefit and care of Bally, the industry and beyond.

Let’s be better together, and create better things.

Whether facilitating greater transparency, publishing a Code of Ethics, increasing the cadence of monitoring and reporting, or aligning with global affiliate organizations to drive awareness industry-wide, having open and honest communications will allow for greater corporate accountability and governance. Not only will we introduce our Sustainability Roadmap to communicate our commitment, maintain accountability and follow-up on its progress, we will endeavor to enact other objectives towards greater transparency, like mapping 90% of Tier 1, 2 and 3 suppliers by 2022.

This pillar demands excellence in design, materials, technology and supply chain, accounting for the most pollutants and waste produced from product to packaging. By enacting better purchasing decisions and evolving sourcing and procurement, we plan to develop longevity programs aimed at product care and repair by 2022, and ensure 100% traceability of all leather back to farms, with 75% of leather purchased from certified tanneries by 2025. We will also strive to ensure 95% of raw materials are traceable to farm level by 2025, among other actionable goals to help minimize harm to the environment.

Since Bally’s founding in 1851, the brand has been a leader in supporting creative minds and diverse communities through the Bally Foundation and Bally Crafting Futures respectively. Bally will continue to strengthen its people, culture and core values through collective entrepreneurship, meaningfulness and high performance (together, the “Bally Way”), by establishing the Bally Peak Outlook Foundation in 2020, committed to preserving extreme mountain environments, and sponsoring critical cleanups of the base camps of Mount Everest and seven 8,000m peaks in the Himalayan region over the course of two years, by 2022. Our ultimate goal is to create a virtuous business model benefiting all: communities, customers, employees and the environment.

Building on our history of innovation, from processes to materials and design, Bally’s future depends on its ability to accelerate change, and find unique and unprecedented solutions that can bring distant goals within reach, like introducing a fully circular product to the market (2025), reducing single-use plastics in B2B and B2C product packaging by 30% (2025), and by 100% (2030) and founding Bally’s Center of Excellence for education, research and development in sustainability (2022).

For further inquiries, please contact sustainability@bally.ch