Talking about sustainability seems almost obvious today, but it is not. The term encompasses a far-sighted attitude that requires, on the part of companies, a complete design vision capable of taking into account respect for the environment as well as a virtuous attitude towards the people who are part of the entire production process.
A complicated puzzle, therefore, made up of many pieces that need to be built over time. Italian Leather Company, as Ilaria Spadacenta explains when she talks about the origin of the brand, first of all promoted Made in Italy and transparency as corporate values: two important pieces of the "sustainability puzzle".
Let's deepen the topic, what are the operations that ILC has activated regarding sustainability?
From the beginning - explains the Managing Director of the company - I strongly wanted to equip ILC with a secure certification and obtained ISO 9001: 2015, the international standard for Quality Management Systems (QMS) published by ISO (International Organization for Standardization). This is the most famous internationally recognized standard that demonstrates that a company is able to achieve significant improvements in terms of organizational efficiency and product quality by minimizing waste, avoiding errors and increasing productivity.
The thing that I found interesting and constructive for the company, experiencing firsthand the period that preceded obtaining the certification, was to realize that meeting the necessary requirements meant, first of all, transferring a system to the entire company staff of rational work. The request for certification has been very important for me since the beginning of our activity, which is why I have always participated in organizational meetings, so much so that when we had the first visit of an inspector of the certification body, he was amazed and told me : “This is the first time I have met an administrator at the initial certification meeting”.
For me, on the other hand, being present was essential: I understood that this was the right way for all employees to take the opportunity to learn a way of working free from wasting time and unnecessary complications. It helped us to create a system: from that moment on, managing an order, a complaint or a delay has no longer been a source of loss of internal energy.
The goal of a certification is also to communicate it externally, right?
The first push, I repeat, was born from my constant "wanting to put my face" in all business choices, I was not interested in being able to put the certification logo and that's it. In fact, if behind the logo there is not the substance of the change, I think it is useless.
Then of course, secondly, it is important to let the customer know: our color charts, in fact, are always completed with information regarding certification and its continuous renewals. In fact, every two years the institution requests all the paperwork for renewal and takes action with the necessary investigations: it is not a walk in the park, every time, however, you must rightly "merit" it.
And now let's look ahead: my goal for the near future is to commit to obtaining another certification that I really care about in 2021, more specific to our sector than the ISO, the LGW (Leather Working Group). The LGW protocol, in fact, is a tool for evaluating the environmental performance of leather goods manufacturers all over the world, in practice it certifies the effort of a company towards ecological production and systemic management of Quality, Environment, Safety and of Ethics, as required by market needs.