LVMH launches website for selling its labels’ unused materials

LVMH has launched Nona Source, a circular economy project unique in the high-end fashion and luxury sector. Nona Source is a website that sells unused fabric and leather stocks from the group’s labels at competitive prices - on average at a 70% discount on wholesale prices - to help emerging designers. The project has been developed internally, by some of the luxury group’s sourcing experts.

The goal is to “offer the opportunity to fashion and design professionals to easily buy materials to which they often wouldn’t have access, at competitive prices and in job lots,” said Nona Source in a press release, indicating that for the time being it only delivers in Europe, adopting a proximity sourcing model, since the materials’ stocks are located in France.

The site features high-quality pictures, powerful zoom enlargement, video clips to convey the touch and feel of the materials and extremely realistic colours. In short, it uses the latest digital technology to present the materials, sold “by the roll or panel, according to the quantities available, with no cutting or sampling.” The website is easy to access and browse, and promises deliveries within 3 to 5 days in France, and up to 7 days in the rest of Europe. The materials are currently available online only, but it is likely that a showroom will be set up in future.

The variety of materials on offer is extensive: woven and knitted fabrics, jersey cotton, lace, lining fabric and leather used for ready-to-wear garments. Nona Source also plans to broaden the range, introducing for example buttons. The materials have been carefully selected by a team of LVMH fashion experts from among the unused stock of the group's labels. Of course, exclusive fabrics and logo-bearing materials developed by the labels are not featured on Nona Source.

For example, 693 m2 of lambskin are sold at €34 per m2, a 70 cm x 70 cm panel of water snake skin is offered at €100 per m2, and 2 m of check-pattern poplin are sold at €14. To begin with, nona-source.com features 100,000 m of fabric stock in 500 different varieties, and 1,000 m of leather.

This unusual e-shop is the brainchild of Romain Brabo, a materials sourcing and ready-to-wear production expert at Givenchy and Kenzo. After discovering a buried treasure of unused fabrics at Givenchy, he began to think about how to bring them back to life. A line of thinking he further refined, after joining Kenzo, with the label’s materials quality expert and CSR manager Marie Falguera. The two worked together on the project, which they presented in 2019 as part of the DARE initiative, a business incubator programme set up by LVMH to promote innovative solutions for the industry.

It was a winning idea, and in March 2020 they were joined by Anne Prieur du Perray, digital transformation manager at LVMH, to work full-time on the website, whose name they borrowed from Roman mythology. Nona is one of the three Parcae goddesses that represent human destiny and necessary change. Nona spins the thread of life, Decima weaves it and Morta cuts it.

LVMH launches website for selling its labels’ unused materials

See also