VAUDE Green Shape

Who can understand all these labels anyway…? You might be right. So why does VAUDE have its own label?

In 2009, when we began to steadily steer our product development toward sustainability, awareness for the ecological and social aspects of clothing was only just beginning to develop.

The message was, that we should not only produce "better" (more environmentally friendly) products – customers should also be able to identify them as such in stores.

We searched high and low, but couldn’t find a quality seal that applied to our different product groups and our products (which are primarily made from synthetic fibers), and that could be used internationally.

So, we developed the VAUDE Green Shape concept and labeled our products accordingly. Green Shape has been around since 2010, and it has become very well established in the market. Now, it’s not just recognized by customers our like ourselves; more and more retailers are buying Green Shape products to make their product range more eco-friendly.

That is why we remain convinced that the VAUDE Green Shape label makes sense.

Up until the Summer Collection 2015, the Green Shape criteria only applied to the materials that we used in our products. This was an important first step but was soon no longer enough for us.

With Green Shape 2.0, the entire product lifecycle is now scrutinized including the design, all materials used, the production facilities, use and care of the product, and potential recycling and/or environmentally friendly disposal.

Green Shape 2.0 is a two-tier process: Each Green Shape product must be made from certified and/or environmentally friendly materials and the production facility where the materials come from must also be environmentally certified. This doubles our safety net, especially with regard to handling chemicals in production.

Green Shape 2.0 expressly excludes the use of particularly critical materials and technologies such as PVC, fluorocarbons, chlorine and bleaches containing hypochlorite, nanotechnology or solvent-containing prints.

Each Green Shape product must be easy to maintain and clean, and cannot require dry cleaning.

The bluesign® system is an important part of the concept. But Green Shape goes beyond the bluesign® system. Green Shape products may not, for example, contain fluorocarbons, while the bluesign® system allows their use under strict conditions.

You can read the complete Green Shape Concept in detail here. A word of warning – it’s complex!

VAUDE is being very transparent in publishing the full concept which was created over the years with a lot of our expertise. If you would like to work with the Green Shape Concept or parts of it, no matter if for your personal interest or commercially, please make sure to name VAUDE Sport as the author and this website as your source of information.

If you have any questions, please don't hesitate to contact us.

Green Shape 2.0 is already very comprehensive. Nevertheless, we are continuing to develop the Green Shape criteria to fill the few gaps left in the concept:

• We will establish a minimum level of material efficiency for Green Shape products to provide incentives for zero-waste design.

• We are currently working on criteria for the repairability of Green Shape products.

• We still need to establish clear guidelines and criteria for the recycling of Green Shape products.

• We need clear guidelines and trial periods for new, innovative materials and technologies that we would like to try out and promote, but because of their market novelty sometimes do not fulfill all the Green Shape criteria. e.g. for certifications.

• To make Green Shape even more credible, we would like to introduce a stringent, internal audit procedure and independent verification.

Feedback, ideas and suggestions are always welcome. Just use the contact link on this page to send us an email.

At the end of the day, a label like Green Shape is about making it easier for you as a customer and product user to be able to recognize which products are more eco friendly so that you can make informed purchasing decisions – for the benefit of us all and the planet.

Together with several other companies in the textile and outdoor industry, we are working on developing an mechanism that we can use to measure and compare the impact of a product on the environment: the Higg Index. You can read more about that here.

Each year we add more Green Shape items to our product range. This is something we're proud of. In the Apparel Collection in particular, we have been increasingly successful in finding environmentally friendly materials from responsible suppliers.

But we are also facing great challenges – especially with tents, backpacks and footwear. Materials such as hard plastics, metals, foams for shoe soles etc. are a fairly hard nut to crack from an ecological point of view. Often, our suppliers’ ability to understand and accept the high environmental requirements for our products still needs to be developed. Therefore, we are investing a great deal of energy into our supply chain. More details here

We have changed the calculation methodology for this graph compared to the last few years: Replacement parts are no longer listed, nor are inner jackets, which are Green Shape, but cannot be assigned to the overall product (inner jacket + outer jacket) in our IT system. In order to be able to compare the figures, we have recalculated all values for all seasons according to the new methodology.

Many VAUDE products now meet our strict Green Shape criteria. However, all of our other VAUDE products that do not or only partially meet the Green Shape criteria are also strictly monitored.

For example, if no certificate from independent third parties such as the bluesign® System or ISO14001 is available for the material and/or material production, our risk assessment automatically increases. This evaluation is the basis of our spot-checks for harmful substances on materials and finished products. Read more about VAUDE’s minimum standard for all products and our Management of Harmful Substances Policy here.