Work in Progress with Donatela Bellone
Photo Credit: Shea Gupta
Chatting work, change and hope this week is Donatela Bellone, founder and CEO of Alu, a fashion-tech platform turning products into post-purchase revenue and loyalty channels for brands using Digital Product Passports. Donatela is a McKinsey alum who led the ESG Insights practice, she won the H&M Foundation1 Global Change Award in 2026, referred to as the "Nobel Prize for fashion." She also runs La Positive Society, a community for sustainability operators inside fashion and luxury. Sustainability has been her life's work. Outside of it, she salsa dances and spends time with her dog.
What are you working on right now?
Personally: I’m actively working on finding more easy and lazy vegetarian meals that are high in protein and iron. I refuse to cook anything that requires me to stand in front of the stove, (just too boring), so I’m always doing either crock pot or oven casseroles.
I’m also working on being active every day. Being a startup founder means it is so easy to deprioritize your own health, so I’m trying really hard not to do that!
Professionally: I’m working on a cool report with Tiina Nyman on the circular potential of DPPs, which will be published via Substack soon. So keep an eye out!
Photo credits left to right: H&M Foundation, Shea Gupta
If you could change one thing about the world of work right now, what would it be, and why?
I had to think hard about this.
So many things could be improved, and I kept going back and forth between critical thinking, compassion, curiosity, tolerance. But I'm going with this: valuing nature and other beings close to as much as human life.
It sounds radical, but hear me out. How much should we value an animal? 80% of a human life? 50%? 10%? Let's say 0.1%. At just 0.1% moral weight, the ~90 billion land animals that are killed every year would represent the moral equivalent of 90 million human deaths. Every year. That's more than the entire death toll of World War II annually! My point isn't about picking the right percentage, it's about how close to zero we currently sit.
We've built a world where nature and other lives barely factor in at all.
There was actually a White House project to put a dollar value on nature, which to some it might feel wrong... after all, nature is priceless.
But the problem is that priceless and worthless look identical right now.
What’s giving you hope right now?
How consumer behavior is changing towards reconnecting with what people already own. We are getting so fed up with algorithms, AI, and micro trends, that people want change.
Case in point: Whering fundraised $7M seed round, currently has 10M users; that’s a lot of people who want to make more use of their what’s in their current closets.
It is not an app specifically designed to for sustainability, but it has an impact on consumption. Resale, repair, rental, and really valuing the human and authentic things in life, are all trends with a potentially huge impact for sustainability.
Work in progress is a celebration of the effort and mindset required to make real change exist.
The most important jobs are never done and great work happens somewhere in the messy middle, where its all too easy to give up. But optimism is a pragmatic choice we make daily, so if you’re navigating change and want a thinking partner along the way, explore how we work.