Stricter travel guidelines

Strict guidelines apply to business travel, designed to minimize both the impact on the environment and travel costs. There is, however, one exception to the guidelines on business travel: we cannot and do not want to cancel trips due to audits at our suppliers. After all, they are the basis of our commitment to quality, fair and humane working conditions for local workers and a proactive approach to environmental protection by our suppliers. However, we want to keep CO₂ emissions as low as possible here as well and also work together with external local service providers.

Silhouette’s own worldwide subsidiaries and regional offices with local staff on site help, among other things, to reduce air travel from Austria to the rest of the world, as opticians and sales partners are looked after by local Silhouette staff.

As well as guidelines for business travel, the Silhouette Group has also decided on a means of reducing shorter trips, such as the commute to work. This is why the guidelines relating to working from home have remained in place, even after the end of the pandemic. Employees will continue to work from home two days a week. This saves on CO₂ emissions and, at the same time, promotes employees’ work-life balance.

Transport emissions saved by 60,000 packages per year

The Silhouette Group has digitalized the entire exchange and returns process in Europe for all three brands. Now, our customers can report issues by taking photos for us to assess, rather than customers having to return faulty items. The need to ship so many products has also been reduced, as our partner opticians no longer need to send the return to the respective local organization for forwarding to our headquarters in Linz. These packages have been shipped directly to Linz by our partner opticians since 2021.

This is a demonstration of how we are streamlining our processes and making an important contribution to the environment. In concrete terms, these measures mean that emissions that would occur when transporting around 60,000 packages have now been eliminated. We’re also in close contact with several partner opticians and are discussing a wide variety of approaches.