This free extension offers ethical alternatives to fast-fashion … but at what price?

On paper, the idea may sound wonderful. French start-up Polip.co offers a web browser extension (currently for Chrome and Firefox) intended to promote more responsible online shopping. When you are on a fast fashion site and you look at the product sheet of a particular garment, you just have to click on the extension button so that it analyzes the model and proposes a similar one from the side of the brands more respectful of men and women. ‘environment. It is free, easy to install and use, as it only takes one click.

The Polip extension helps make online purchases more responsible

Co-founded by Zita Aoun and Tarik Aoun, Polip works through artificial intelligence of image recognition. This is what allows it to offer alternatives to what is displayed on the screen. But it is technology automatic learning (i.e. the more the extension is used, the more it will improve, as it learns and refines as it is used) has the limits of its advantages: sometimes it falls completely out of place, if the model in the eshop wears a light complicated garment and / or layers, and / or in front of a complex background.

Even with ethical brands, shopping is still shopping

This beautiful initiative which is supposed to promote a more responsible relationship with fashion also offers a reward system for committed brands that highlights, in the form of an ethi’Kdo card (which aims to be eco-friendly and supportive). Reductions, in short. However, one wonders if this would not encourage the act of buying, as the more you buy from the suggested ethical brands, the more rewarded you are….

This also raises the question of the economic model of this free extension : is paid in commission on purchases made through it? And / or thanks to the data collected, hot installed in our browser to analyze our online behavior? Contacted by Losethe co-founders have not yet answered us on these two points.

Because information is power, even when it comes to shopping, it is always interesting to discover in person a brand and a product that would tempt you, before buying in person: you are never safe from greenwashing. You can also grab a reflex to check if it’s not already available on second-hand sites like Vinted, Vestiaire Collective or Depop. And above all, we can ask ourselves if we really need this new piece that grabs our attention, no matter how ethical the brand that produced it is. Because it remains the most ecological gesture that can be done in terms of fashion arranged, with style, with the clothes you already have.

Front page photo credit: Screenshot of the Zara eshop with the Polip extension.