Symolem was founded by Lavinia Fernandes, who brings nearly two decades at the heart of global luxury fashion to one of the industry's most urgent challenges: making supply chains transparent.

Lavinia held senior roles in luxury retail and e-commerce, including at Stylebop.com and Al-Ostoura, giving her a close view of how fashion moves from production to the customer — and where its real costs stay hidden.

She later moved into sustainability and carbon markets, leading innovation at Viridios Capital and building AI-native compliance infrastructure for international sustainability programmes. In 2022 she authored a plastics credits project for Ghana, and earlier this year she moderated the Energy from Waste debate alongside the heads of Ghana's Carbon Market Office. Today she is a global advisor on digital product identity, chain of custody, Digital Product Passports, EPR policy, and MRV for fashion value chains and climate finance projects.

She holds an Executive MBA from London College of Fashion (UAL) and an MA in Fashion Journalism (2004), and sits on the UN/CEFACT UNTP Supply Chain Working Group — the body defining the technical standards that will underpin Digital Product Passport implementation worldwide. She is also Vice-Chair of Landfills2Landmarks, a Ghana-based NGO, where she has been instrumental in designing its traceability platform.

Few people sit at this intersection: the instincts of a fashion insider paired with the regulatory and technical fluency to turn ESPR compliance from an obligation into an advantage. That is the foundation Symolem is built on.