Our engagements
In everyday life, we like to laugh, a lot and about everything, but when it comes to Nomasei's core values, our light-heartedness gives way to the seriousness required to generate a positive impact.
In creating Nomasei, we took the risk of abandoning our secure careers in major luxury houses in order to commit ourselves to putting meaning back into our profession by offering a responsible and sustainable alternative, as well as responding to our generation's need for meaning and change.
As proof of this, we set out here in full transparency the values, objectives and commitments that guide our approach on a daily basis.
To build this new ecosystem, we are relying on 4 pillars.
PILLAR I - A RESPONSIBLE LUXURY PRODUCT
Our raison d'être is to offer a quality product, at a fair price, that is sustainable and has a controlled environmental and human impact. To give ourselves the means to achieve our ambition, we have given shares in Nomasei to our manufacturer, so as to include his know-how in our value chain.
We work with restraint, quality and simplicity, and our products must meet two principles: responsibility and sustainability. Design and commitment go hand in hand.
our plant
In the fashion industry, the garment part is often the most opaque and the one that raises the most questions about its integrity. Our manufacturer not only shares our values of respect for people and the environment, but also has a wealth of expertise.
Located in the village of Montopoli in Tuscany, the factory was founded some twenty years ago by two friends and is now run by the founders' 3 sons, who employ around forty people :
- The use of clean materials such as solvent-free glue.
- The relationship of trust, fairness and respect they maintain with their employees.
- The network of small family businesses they have built up with whom they share the same values.
The factory makes production even more sustainable and further improves working conditions.
OUR SUPPLIERS' MAP
To meet our criteria of transparency, fair pricing and respect for our customers, we don't outsource any of the operations carried out on our shoes: everything - from cutting the leather to assembling the shoe - is done in Tuscany, at a maximum distance of 55km from the factory, creating a virtuous, resilient, fairer and more sustainable ecosystem.
This proximity also enables us to make our partners aware of their environmental and human impact, by integrating them fully into the project.
Our materials
- COTTON : Our cotton is certified organic GOTS
- LEATHER : We choose our leathers primarily for their aesthetic qualities and comfort, but also and above all because they meet ethical and sustainable imperatives.
In our quest to offer a product that lasts, our leathers are of the highest quality and come from tanneries that we know personally after thirty years of combined experience, so we know where the animals raised to produce these hides come from, what processes were used in tanning, and under what conditions these tanneries are run.
All our leathers are Reach-certified. Some large tanneries hold certifications (eco-leather certification, leather traceability certification, etc.) or are members of the Leather Working Group.
VEGETABLE LEATHER - METAL FREE LEATHER
The ethical leather debate highlights vegetable-tanned leather as a more ethical option, due to its tanning process using vegetable tannins.
We prefer the alternative of so-called "Metal Free" leather, which excludes all use of metals for tanning, opting instead for a synthetic process. Although this process requires more water, the less polluting quality of this water means that tanneries can reuse it, creating a closed circuit. This option is currently considered the best, offering ecological advantages and aesthetic qualities such as suppleness, depth of color and hand roundness.
The creative process
Contrary to the frenetic pace of fashion to which even the big houses have now submitted, we choose a slower pace, which respects the constraints of our product.
This allows us to ensure that each piece receives the attention and care it deserves.
Our creative process works organically, but above all rests on several fundamental elements.
- We work hand in hand with the manufacturer from the very first sketches to understand the technical feasibility and thus optimize our time and resources.
- Our product must have a purpose, a function, and be aesthetically and qualitatively sustainable to be timeless.
- We don't choose between design and commitment. Design is the most important element, because our primary role is to make something beautiful, but above all we have to do it properly and respect our ethical commitments.
We take our time and don't rush things. - A shoe requires an average of 80 operations, from the carved wooden last to the box. We take much longer to design our shoes than other major brands, and our attention to each stage of production is uncompromising.
- We are our first customers and consumers, and probably the most demanding. Until we are completely satisfied with a product, we continue to refine it.
PILLAR II - TRANPARENCY
Committing to a sustainable, responsible project that reshapes the industry means being grounded in reality, knowing your weaknesses and strengths, and taking responsibility for them so as to correct them. It means constantly questioning your own actions, taking responsibility for them, and doing so transparently.
All our decisions, doubts and advances are shared with our internal staff and our customers. And as far as possible, we rely on figures and tangible data to meet this commitment.
OUR CARBON TARGETS
Reducing and controlling carbon emissions is THE main challenge in the face of global warming, and is therefore an integral part of our approach. But we strongly believe that offsetting is only relevant if the company's business model is already virtuous and minimizes its impact.
Offsetting at all costs while remaining within a productivist model of expansion makes no sense to us.
TODAY : we can claim to be a low-carbon company because we minimize our emissions as much as possible:
- By producing locally: all our components are produced around 40km from the factory and 90% of our raw materials come from Europe (Italy, France, Holland)
- We adopt a frugal attitude. We only develop what we absolutely believe in. And we have a development philosophy that consists of creating only products that we are sure will last a long time.
- We recycle our waste, minimize our transport. We recycle our waste and minimize our transport. "
TOMORROW : We're a low-carbon company, but we produce in Italy and ship worldwide, living in an open economy. So our carbon footprint is real, and we'll be working hard to offset it.naively, we thought we could do it in 6 months.
But such is the importance of the subject that we can't just slap a "carbon neutral" label on our shoes until we've found the most optimal solution for offsetting it.
PILLAR III - REINVENTING THE COMPANY
We're building Nomasei on a new philosophy of growth. We're a company, so it's natural to seek profitability, but expansion at any price is not one of our values. We value quality over quantity, and want more than anything else to remain free in our choices.
A REASONABLE MODEL
That's why we've based our partnership pact on the values of sustainability, ethical commitment and social responsibility.
Nomasei was built differently, because we are committed to our independence and to remaining a company on a human scale. Small size makes our brand more agile and free to respond with commitment to each of the issues we encounter.
Our aim is to grow sufficiently to preserve know-how and territories, to encourage initiatives with a positive social impact and to help make the world a healthier place.
OUR MARGINS
Luxury fashion has never been so expensive, yet the quality of products has never been so poor. There was a time when buying a luxury or premium product meant keeping it for a long time, but this is no longer necessarily the case, and we're running out of qualitative alternatives.
To put an end to this harmful system, we have one obsession: the fairest possible price so that as many people as possible have access to our offer.
To do this, we concentrate our spending on the element that seems most important to us: the product. We are uncompromising, especially when it comes to the quality of our materials.
Where our competitors multiply their costs exponentially, and charge unreasonable margins, we've decided to control our own. Not least because only 15% of our budget is devoted to communication, while our competitors spend 80%. Our more agile online distribution model, with no intermediaries from our factories to your wardrobe, enables us to offer you the best value for money.
That's also why we don't have a sales policy. Our prices and margins don't allow it.
OUR PRICES
Above all, we want to establish transparency as a supreme value, ensuring that you understand what you're paying for when you buy a luxury product. These multiple commitments shape a value system that we see as both a standard to be met and a goal to be achieved, day after day. In this way, we believe that balance, responsibility and humility are highly sustainable behaviors.
PILLAR V - PUTTING PEOPLE FIRST
There can be no environmental well-being without human well-being. The collective and the sense of sharing are at the heart of our concerns, and are reflected in the very essence of the Nomasei project. We don't do anything alone, and everyone's work is valued as essential to the success of this project.
Our work must contribute to preserving territories, communities and know-how. Entire regions, such as Tuscany in Italy, depend on the manufacture of luxury shoes. We are committed to not relocating our development and production so as not to impoverish and drain these regions of their work.
Nomasei, in Italian verlan, means "Six Hands". This name evokes the collective work and consideration of every human being involved in the making of a pair of shoes, and means that each creation is the fruit of the collaboration of many hands and many skills, united around an idea that becomes a creation.
the founders
We met in 2016 while we were both working at Chloé. Our first day of work took place in a factory in Italy and we realized that we shared the same passion for the product and the work of the hand. This is what led us to reinvent our profession – as we ourselves are victims of the frantic pace of collections – to make sense of it.
We share the same values and commitments in our personal lives, it was therefore natural to build Nomasei on these pillars.
our artisans
The fashion industry tends to stare at an individual in the person of the artistic director; Nomasei’s philosophy is built in total opposition to this. We favor, on the contrary, the sense of sharing and collective work, because it is collaboration and exchange that emanate the most beautiful ideas.
The factory, which is our privileged partner, has about forty employees all proud of their profession and the know-how they preserve: Massimo, Francesco, Davide, Silvia, Laura, Andrea, Cinzia, Manola, Siliana, Monica, Lucia, Alessandro, Omar, Rosaria, Simone, Ivan, Sauro, Alessandro, Michele, Cornelia Iuliana, Simonetta, Monica, Francesco, Barbara, Lucia, Ornella, Alessandro, Massimo, Fiorella, Gina, Martina, Paola, Rita, Marco, Francesco, Francesca, Gessica, Luciano.
our external collaborators
The product expertise is guaranteed by the founding team as well as the factory, but for all other questions, we build an ecosystem of experts that enlighten us and allow us to make the best possible decisions. This bias implies listening to each stakeholder and offering an inclusive and free expression framework where creativity and vision of each find its place. Because a happy and fulfilled team will invest more in the process of change that we want to establish.