The Key Drivers of Born-Sustainable Businesses: Evidence from the Italian Fashion Industry

Environmental pollution has become one of the most pressing preoccupations for governments, policymakers, and consumers. For this reason, many companies make constant efforts to comply with international laws and standards on ethics, social responsibility, and environmental protection. Fashion companies are among the main producers of pollution because their manufacturing processes result in highly negative outcomes for the environment. In recent years, numerous fashion industries have been transforming their production policies to be sustainable, while others are already born as sustainable businesses. Based on Resource-Based View (RBV) theory and Natural Resource-Based View theory (NRBV), this paper aims at understanding how internal and external factors stimulate born-sustainable businesses operating in the fashion sector, adopting a multiple case study methodology. Our analysis shows that culture, entrepreneurial orientation of the founders, and the proximity of the suppliers among the internal factors, combined with the increase of green consumers as an external factor, foster the creation of green businesses. At the same time, neither current legislation nor the dynamism and competitiveness of markets have influenced the choice of the companies’ founders to start a business based on green production logic. These results reveal the centrality of the founders’ sensitivity toward green strategies to create a sustainable business. The findings have practical implications because they could support regulatory institutions to introduce some incentives that more clearly encourages companies that choose to adopt sustainable business models from the founding, by acting to the internal and external key factors that drive born-sustainable businesses. This study also provides an extension of the existing literature on sustainable born companies, offering researchers useful information on internal and internal factors that promote the adoption of green policies in the fashion industry.