LVMH just booked €500 million from repairing and refilling ten million products, the first time the luxury group has counted mending as revenue instead of a courtesy.
LVMH has put a market value on its repair services for the first time. Fixing, refilling, and taking back its own products generated about €500 million in additional revenue from ten million repaired items last year, the group told reporters. It marks the first time the conglomerate behind Louis Vuitton, Dior, and Tiffany had presented mending as a revenue line rather than just a sustainability footnote.
Repair has always gone on inside luxury houses, folded in after-sales and offered as a favor to a good customer. The products were repaired in workshops, fitted with a refill, or taken back by the houses, the group said. “‘New’ does not mean ‘brand new,'” Hélène Valade, LVMH’s environment development director, told FashionUnited. “It could be a magnificent bag that has been completely reworked to give it a new look. I think there is a real need among some consumers for this new service.”
LVMH called the tally its first quantified assessment of what it terms creative circularity. The mending sits inside a larger system the group has built to keep materials in play, one that resells leftover designer fabric through a marketplace called Nona Source, routes unsold stock through a recovery center called Cedre, and breaks down what cannot be reused through a textile-recycling venture, Weturn. Forty-one percent of the materials the group used last year were recycled, it said.
Selling luxury repair
At Louis Vuitton, circularity has becomes an ingredient for loyalty. “A customer who has trust will return for another purchase,” Christelle Capdupuy, the house’s sustainable development director, told the outlet. “Repair is therefore not a cost centre, but a driver of brand preference.”
The infrastructure is already enormous. Louis Vuitton traces its repair service back to 1860 and says its 1,200 artisans now rejuvenate thousands of pieces a year, with a network of twelve dedicated ateliers completing 98 percent of repairs locally to cut the emissions of shipping them around the world. A customer starts a repair in a boutique or through the brand’s app, and the piece travels to the nearest atelier rather than back to France.
Across the Channel, Burberry reproofs trench coats and darns cashmere through ReBurberry. Coach has built (Re)Loved into restored, remade, and trade-in tiers, with more than 600 pieces for sale and a repair workshop that earned a zero-waste certification. Hermès mends leather, watches, and jewelry through its ateliers, changing a bag’s zipper, re-dyeing shoes, or widening a pair of boots. Chanel offers restoration and alteration under Chanel & moi and now carries a five-year warranty on the bags it has sold since 2021. All of it keeps the customer inside the brand rather than sending her to a corner cobbler or a consignment shop.
Repair increasingly arrives bundled with resale. Burberry routes trade-ins to Vestiaire Collective; Coach takes bags back for store credit and rebuilds them into new pieces under a Remade label; LVMH’s own take-back programs recover items to fix, resell, or recycle. The house that mends a bag is often the one that buys it back. Repairs protect resale value too, which 60 percent of shoppers now weigh before buying a new item.
Regulation is pushing the same way. The European Union’s right-to-repair rules, which member states must apply from July 2026, have made repairability a baseline expectation across consumer goods; they give shoppers an extra year of legal guarantee for choosing to fix a product rather than replace it, and an online platform to find repairers is due in 2027. A separate European directive now requires brands to tell shoppers how durable and repairable a product is, tightening the ground under vague sustainability claims. France and Sweden have cut taxes to make mending cheaper. Luxury is moving ahead of any mandate, and it can charge for the service besides.
For Valade, the counting is a milestone in a long argument, not the start of one. “This is the bet I have been making for 20 years,” she told FashionUnited. “Behind all of this, there are very strong societal shifts. If a company does not embrace them, it is not able to embody this responsibility at the product level.”
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