"We want sustainable businesses with a strategy for people, planet, and purpose"

Frederikke Antonie Schmidt
Founder and Creative Director at Roccamore

Overall, digital development and sustainability remain the biggest challenges and opportunities in the industry – even in 2025. Digital development revolves around AI, where SMEs especially have a real chance to make significant progress with limited resources. If businesses dare to explore AI’s potential, it can be a key driver of growth. Sustainability, on the other hand, is a larger and more complex beast to tackle, particularly for manufacturing companies. In 2025, companies will be required to have (even) better control of their value chain and environmental footprint. The law mandating product passports for all products will soon come into effect, yet many businesses have not begun collecting data on their products or gaining sufficient oversight of their value chain. This will be a challenge for them, but there are huge opportunities for those who get ahead of the curve.

I believe that the themes shaping 2025 will include a more polarized consumer base. While the Temu trend will grow, there will also be increasing focus on not buying new items. The anti-shopping trend, born out of the “No-Buy Pledge,” started on TikTok and will grow even bigger and stronger in 2025. This type of consumer has reached “stuff saturation” and takes pride in using their products for longer. When they do buy new items, they often turn to the preloved market, which is also experiencing growth.

Consumers will still hold onto their money in 2025, for one reason or another. Companies should continue to cut their expenses as sharply as possible and invest as much as they can with their own funds. Debt is more expensive than before, and growth for growth’s sake is no longer trendy. What we want are sustainable businesses with strategies that address people, planet, and purpose.

Two years ago, Roccamore became the first brand in the world to offer Cradle-to-Cradle-certified high-heeled shoes. We opened our value chain, made it transparent, and launched a partnership with Spoor, allowing customers to trace their shoes’ journey all the way back to the individual cow in the field – Danish cows, to be exact – via a QR code embedded in our final products. We are building this concept and plan to launch a product passport for our shoes in 2025. In January, we’re also opening Roccamore ReLoved, where we buy back used products in good condition from customers. We also hope that 2025 will be the year we integrate resale information into the QR codes on our shoes, so that in the future, buyers can digitally track the shoes’ sales journey, data, and more.