Gabriele Aprea: Towards Corporate Culture
Embracing sustainability by looking beyond the local area and district concept
Gold and diamonds. Much of the jewelry industry has always revolved around this pairing, and this is what the meeting in VO Square, Hall 6 will focused on during VicenzaOro. The Club degli Orafi Italia has planned this event, with the theme “New frontiers for sustainability: How ready are you to head into the future?” Actually, this will be an opportunity to understand jewelry professionals’ new “green attitude,” which goes well beyond the materials, allowing for coming up with new business models. Gabriele Aprea, president of Chantecler and one of the organizers of the event, will open the panel along with Gaetano Cavalieri, president of Cibjo. «Speaking about sustainability today is very different than ten or twenty years ago», says Aprea. «It seems like a century has passed since the Kimberley Process from back in 2002, and things are moving faster today, and we can finally talk about corporate culture. But there is certainly much more to do in order to be able to say that the jewelry supply chain is 100% sustainable. Also because the situation is different from country to country. One of the signers of that document in 2002 was De Beers, and Forevermark is part of that group. Costantino Papadimitriou, global CMO of the brand, talked about the situation with diamonds, while we were focused on gold with Giorgio Villa, CEO of 8853 S.p.A. and the vice president of Club degli Orafi Italia. We’ve brought in Diana Verde Nieto, CEO of Positive Luxury to tie these themes together. Her company’s portal promotes and certifies products (and sells via e-commerce) from ethical companies focused on fashion, accessories, travel, beauty and, obviously, jewelry and watches. This is the perfect example of how certain themes have become popular when it comes to attracting new consumers. This is especially true for small companies in order to be able to continue to compete against the big luxury groups. As for Italian microbusinesses, which in 2016 included 25,000 companies for a total of 75,000 workers (an average of three per company), we want to create ways to bring them together under the sustainability umbrella, going beyond just the local area and the district concept. This could help them stand out internationally as well».
