The UK Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) announced on 29 July 2022 that it will be scrutinising claims made by a major UK supermarket chain, an online-only fast fashion brand and a leading online clothing retailer. The investigation will focus on claims made about the retailers’ fashion products, including clothing, footwear and accessories which were marketed as being environmentally friendly or ‘sustainable’ under the respective retailers’ dedicated eco-friendly product ranges.
The CMA will focus on the statements made by the retailers to examine whether the language used was too broad and vague, and whether it gave consumers the impression that the ranges and products are more sustainable than they are in reality. In particular, statements made by the companies about their fabric accreditation schemes may have lacked specificity as to whether those schemes applied to specific products or to the retailers’ products generally, and/or may have lacked sufficient (or indeed any) information about what the fabrics in question were made of.
The CMA will also investigate the criteria which these retailers used to assess the sustainability of their products. Those criteria are suspected to be more relaxed than what customers might reasonably expect, accounting for the descriptions and overall presentation of the products. The CMA has also expressed concern that various products which had been included in the retailers’ eco-friendly ranges did not appear to meet the retailers’ own criteria for ‘eco-friendliness’.
Should the CMA find the retailers to have misled consumers, possible outcomes may include securing undertakings from those retailers to change the way they operate or pursuing court action against them. The CMA have warned that this investigation marks the beginning of their increased scrutiny of sustainability claims in the fashion industry.
