Anne-Laure Descours, former Chief Sourcing Officer of PUMA, has joined the Board of Swiss DNA-tracer company Haelixa. Descours will be key in advancing Haelixa’s mission to achieve transparency and trust in the fashion and textile industries, scaling physical traceability and authentication solutions for recycled and premium fibers, and finished products.
Descours’ appointment comes at a pivotal time, as the fashion and textile industries face regulation fatigue, despite ongoing demand to trace supply chains. At the same time, NGOs, activist groups, and watchdogs are intensifying scrutiny, while fraudulent materials and counterfeit goods erode consumer trust and brand/manufacturer relationships. According to the European Union Intellectual Property Office, counterfeit goods in the EU alone cost an estimated €16 billion of lost revenue annually.
Haelixa’s technology makes its mark by tackling these risks. It enables physical traceability and verification of origin, combating fraud and counterfeit problems across the entire value chain.
Descours is a respected and passionate industry leader who has taken a leading stance on responsible supply chains at PUMA and within leadership forums such as Zero100. The executive sees an opportunity for Haelixa’s physical tracer to solve material and product verification challenges for brands and manufacturers, and will facilitate closer partnerships between Haelixa and leading manufacturing groups within global supply chains.
The appointment marks a first at traceability companies, which typically favour finance, technology, and investment executives for their boards. Female board members are even rarer. Descours has long spoken out about the strengths women bring to leadership roles:
“The collaborative and empathetic traits women tend to show unite teams and encourage openness and collaboration, rather than friction and unhelpful competitiveness.”
Descours brings over three decades of sourcing experience to the board role and recently joined the Gildan Activewear Board of Directors. She explains why she chose to accept Haelixa’s request to join the board:
“For brands, the accuracy of tracing solutions has been a challenge, but with Haelixa’s technology, once you spray it [invisibly] on the fibre or product, there is no way you can cheat on that. It is a non-removable application that will give the brand and the manufacturer peace of mind, and it’s basically two for one: traceability and anti-counterfeit protection.”
Strumpf says that Descours’ appointment (which he devised) offers the company key advantages at a time when brands and manufacturers are grappling with new regulations, harsh economic conditions, and loss of momentum on sustainability initiatives: “Our biggest challenge is getting our solution to the right people. We found it easy to run pilots with sustainability teams, but didn’t manage to jump across to the sourcing teams and therefore establish recurring business”.
Accessing manufacturers and explaining the technology to them has also been a challenge, according to Strumpf, and one that Descours will assist Haelixa in overcoming. Descours believes that physical traceability is as much a risk mitigation tool for manufacturers as for brands: “When things go wrong in the supply chain, the brand passes the burden to the manufacturer, so this is a tool that protects the manufacturer’s business,” if they mark materials and products’ on site’ before shipping, proving provenance later in the value chain.
Strumpf says that while spraying on Haelixa’s physical tracer comes at a cost, so does fraud:
“Major scandals can hurt brands, particularly on premium materials or products, and our technology has two key ways of protecting businesses: verifying fibre origin and flow through the supply chain, and anti-counterfeiting to prove the brand mark and quality.”
Sharing the longer-term vision, Strumpf explains: “We want to become the main platform for end-to-end product traceability, due to the flexibility to spray our invisible DNA tracers onto materials or products at any stage”. Regarding textile circularity, Strumpf adds: “By marking textile waste at sorting and recycling facilities, we can trace and verify the flow and percentage of mechanically recycled fibres into new materials and products”. Descours, who spearheaded the RE:FIBRE polyester textile-to-textile recycling initiative at PUMA, adds:
“When it comes to textile recycling, tracking and tracing feedstock and fibres has a heavy workload and can involve blockchain technology, which is complex for a brand to implement. Haelixa has a solution with the trust from a brand-protection perspective: once you’ve sprayed it, it’s permanent.”
Anne-Laure Descours joins fellow board members Patrick Strumpf, Dr. Gediminas Mikutis, co founder and CTO of Haelixa, and Stefan Karlen, CEO of ImpactOne and ex-CEO of Panalpina. Descours will continue to be based in Hong Kong.
About Haelixa
Haelixa was founded in 2016 as a spin-off from ETH Zürich by scientists Michela Puddu and Gediminas Mikutis. It is a spray-on DNA tracer with bulletproof lab-testability that verifies material and product authenticity from the point of application. Haelixa’s tracer contains DNA from native mountain herbs that adhere permanently to a wide range of materials and products, such as textiles and apparel, precious metals, and gemstones, offering traceability and proof of authenticity.
Backed by the expertise of the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, Haelixa is a globally recognized leader in supply chain transparency and is trusted by major brands including C&A, OVS, and Hugo Boss. As of 2024, Haelixa had traced over 30,000,000 garments. Haelixa haswon more than 20 global awards for its patented technology.
About Anne-Laure Descours
Sustainability Advisor and Ex-Chief Sourcing Officer at PUMA
Anne-Laure Descours was PUMA’s Chief Sourcing Officer and member of the Board until December 2024 and has recently transitioned to Group Advisor for Sustainability. She joined PUMA in 2012 and, from 2019 to 2024, in her role as CSO, she supervised Product Development and Sourcing and was also PUMA’s Chief Sustainability Officer. This dual role helped to establish a global and resilient supply chain despite a challenging environment while accelerating the brand commitment to sustainability and efforts through the purposeful use of digital technology throughout product development and sourcing, leading the industry towards responsible practices.
In March this year, she was appointed Director of the Board of Gildan Activewear, one of the world’s largest vertically integrated Apparel manufacturers. A French national, Anne-Laure, has 35 years of experience in the Sourcing industry and has been based in Hong Kong since 1994. Before PUMA, she worked for international sourcing organizations, such as Li & Fung and Otto International.