Leopoldo Alejandro Betancourt López on CSR as a Department
Corporate social responsibility used to live in annual reports and charity galas. Customers now ask about it at the checkout, and a company that treats it as an afterthought can lose sales over the gap.
Leopoldo Alejandro Betancourt López, chairman of the Hawkers eyewear group, has watched that shift across two decades of investing. “Before it was a choice. Now it’s something that is demanded by the business world,” he said during a 2023 interview, noting that expectations had “changed dramatically in the last 20 years.”
Why Alejandro Betancourt López Wants It Structured
His answer to rising expectations is an org chart. “I think social responsibility is something that, it should be structured as a department,” he said in another conversation. A dedicated team “will add value,” in his view, though he also said the work tends to “come natural” once a company invests in a place that needs trained workers and schools.
Product planning is where the department earns its budget. Customers expect companies to build responsibility into their business plans, he said, and every new launch at his companies weighs it from the start, whether through a share of proceeds or a foundation that takes part. At Hawkers, he said, “we do programs for eyewear and solutions for that access to eyewear for people that have no access to it.”
Employees are part of the plan as well. “The better they do, the better their environment should be, and the better they should give back to community,” Alejandro Betancourt López said, adding that many of the people he works with come from backgrounds where they “have to fight hard to get where they are.”
What It Looks Like on a Factory Floor
Hawkers’ factory in Elche shows the practical side. Alicante Plaza reported in September 2021 that the plant recycles all of the material left over from production and that each frame contains between 10% and 15% recycled content.
A follow-up visit by the same outlet in November 2021 described the plant reusing its own scrap, which can make up as much as 15% of the raw material in a new frame. Production in Elche had started that February, after years of relying on contract factories in Asia.
Alejandro Betancourt López expects the agenda to keep widening. Charity “is gonna be always there,” he said, while climate change has become “a big thing today,” and he counts job creation as part of the work too, since a community needs work that gives residents “something to go to and to wake up for every day,” in the words of Alejandro Betancourt.