Challenges in a changing world

Our responsibility for the entire VAUDE product supply chain begins with being deeply familiar with our producers and suppliers and where the ingredients for our products come from. This is still not a given in the textile industry.

Our challenge is to create this transparency even for small parts purchased by our suppliers themselves. We have already achieved a great deal in this area, but we haven’t reached 100 % yet. Find out more here.

Our producers

Here we describe where our products and materials are manufactured: 

 

• Material policy
• Our producers
• Magement of harmful substances
  
  

Another challenge for us is to make it clear to our customers where their VAUDE product is manufactured, preferably directly in the web shop. We are currently testing various technical options to achieve this.

 Transparency in itself doesn’t say anything about how sustainable our supply chain actually is.

With regard to social issues, we are therefore working together with Fair Wear, which annually reviews how successful we are in implementing high social standards. Find out more here

The assessment of our suppliers with regard to environmental protection is a greater challenge for us: we simply do not have data on emissions, energy and water consumption, waste generation or biodiversity.

That's why we have high hopes for the Higg Index. The Higg Index was developed as a joint venture of the textile industry and is the first international uniform instrument for measuring the sustainability of textile products throughout the entire supply chain.

More on the Higg Index here

Our products generally have to be transported over long distances from the producer to our retail customers. This transport generates not only CO2 emissions, but also pollutants such as sulphur dioxide. We therefore want to make our transports as environmentally friendly as possible. Together with myclimate, we have calculated a variety of transport and emissions scenarios. Our products travel primarily by large container ship and by rail from their place of production to our warehouse. These methods are the most environmentally friendly alternative, according to our calculations.

Nevertheless, we still see room for improvement. Together with the University of Darmstadt, we analyzed how we could make our transport even more environmentally friendly in a project. Within the project we defined a roadmap with several measures.

More at "Merchandise logistics"

Since 2013 we have been working diligently to find solutions with a program of trust and innovation. The central question is what structural and cultural changes do we need to make to remain sustainable and innovative so that we will have a secure future. We have found many effective answers that are summarized under the title "The self-effective organization."

The self-effective organization makes use of the duality of security and insecurity. Our values such as trust and partnership, our visions and goals form the basis and provide orientation in order to self-effectively and quickly react to challenges. In doing so, we can develop diverse and tailored solutions. We are making use of a wide variety of approaches – from complete self-organization and non-hierarchy in interdisciplinary teams to process reliable processes.

The self-effective organization depends on all employees giving feedback – both critical and constructive. Treating each other as equals is a central component that leads to a highly effective organization and employees.

Continuing to develop our self-effective organization is an ongoing task that is constantly shaped by new objectives and hurdles within the context of current events – such as the Corona pandemic since 2020 and the rapid digitization of work processes. It has become apparent that our trust-based, self-effective collaboration has carried us through tough times and that the work we’ve put in has paid off many times over.

More at "VAUDE culture of trust"

Our intention is to create the structures for a health balance between professional and personal life. We have managed to develop a family-friendly culture. On average, we have about 40 employees who are on parental leave each year as well as a high part-time employment rate (39 % in 2021).

We want to make real compatibility possible and yet we occasionally must face the limits and special effort that following this path entails. The challenges that we are confronting include organizational management (especially scheduling and workplace equipment) and the assurance of our productivity.

Furthermore, our childcare center is operating at full capacity and we can’t guarantee every employee the opportunity to have their child cared for directly here at VAUDE.

Our human resources department consistently develops concepts for parental leave and re-entering the workforce in order to ensure that they are quickly reintegrated into their teams in a value-adding and efficient manner. We are currently working on a concept for job sharing and job rotation for managing our high part-time employee rate. The use of mobile work, which we offer nationwide, is very valuable in this context. In addition, in the future we want to examine the issue of care-giver leave and professional sabbatical because we feel that they are becoming ever more relevant for our employees.

Our intention is to create the structures for a health balance between professional and personal life. We have managed to develop a family-friendly culture. On average, we have about 50 employees who are on parental leave each year. Our VAUDE birth rate is four times the German average.

More: "Professional and private life: We make almost everything possible"

Even though we receive a great deal of positive feedback regarding our employer brand and are in high demand from applicants in many specialist areas, there are some areas (such as our manufacturing and logistics departments) in which it is very difficult to reach our increasing personnel requirements. Our HR department and team managers are called upon to develop sustainable solutions in order to address qualified people in our region more directly and effectively and also to retain them permanently in the employment relationship. The use of various media, including the increasing use of social media, plays a significant role in this. For example, we have initiated the "Employees recruit employees" project, which aims to recruit satisfied employees as "ambassadors" for the acquisition of new applicants and, if successful, to award small bonuses for this.

Our aim is to do business that is climate-neutral and to reduce our emissions as much as possible. About one-third of the emissions in VAUDE’s carbon footprint come from business travel and commuting. We have an urgent need to implement measures aimed at reducing emissions. However, VAUDE cannot do this on its own.

Everyone must pull together to get new transport policies off the ground – local politicians, transport companies and business.

Read more about the VAUDE mobility concept here.

VAUDE Climate footprint for Obereisenbach here

For several years now, the outdoor industry has been growing at a very low level and has developed into a competitive market. For us as a family-owned company in an industry that is dominated by more and more companies backed by financially strong investors, this means ensuring economic independence through careful planning and the use of alternative financing options - see "Sustainable business is worthwhile".

In addition, the international outdoor market has been characterized by numerous upheavals in recent years. Examples include strong concentration processes for both stores and brands, winters with little snow and strong fluctuations in the dollar exchange rate. In order to secure our business success, it is very important for us to be independent of these upheavals. We are therefore committed to a healthy balance of several sources of income.

As a mountain sports brand, we also rely on the potential of our urban and bike products in several distribution channels, our Professional Business Segment, which includes not only industrial customers but also public procurement, associations and other civil society organizations. We are investing in our Made in Germany production and in the expansion of European markets.

Compared to our competitors, we have been meeting these challenges well so far. Our growth rates in recent years were higher than the European outdoor market average. Nevertheless, we must continue to deal consistently with the opportunities and risks of the market and conduct our strategic and economic planning based on the findings of market analysis. We are committed to a long-term perspective and homogenous, stable growth.

More at "Our Markets" and "Sustainable Management"

In order to establish a successful sustainability management system, the technical requirements necessary to optimally utilize available knowledge and data about our own sustainability performance must be created. Currently, data collection, evaluation and analysis are largely done manually. This is very time-consuming and error prone.

In order to increase our efficiency and monitor it even more specifically, the development of our IT landscape in the coming years is a high priority. Since 2016 we have been working on a transition to a new ERP system that will integrate the sustainability management system.

The challenge is that the ERP systems available on the market do not meet our requirements. The integration of sustainability management into such a system is therefore associated with large amounts of time and financial resources. We have developed a design for this integration, and implementation is planned to take place by 2022.