Senior Researcher & Social Entrepreneur
SOFFA / The Nest Coop
Athens, Greece
Dr. Fiori A. Zafeiropoulou is a Greek social entrepreneur, researcher and global advocate working to transform fashion from one of the world’s most extractive industries into a force for dignity, regeneration and local prosperity.
She is the founder and president of SOFFA – the Social Fashion Factory in Athens, Board Member of Fashion Revolution, and a Senior Researcher at the Athens University of Economics and Business, where she explores how ethical, green and digitally enabled manufacturing can return to the city. Her work sits at the intersection of social justice, industrial renewal and cultural imagination: from supporting women survivors of trafficking and violence through co-creation, training and work integration, to rebuilding local textile and footwear ecosystems through circular design, traceability, education and AI-enabled production. She also serves in Fashion Revolution’s global governance transition, helping shape the movement’s evolution toward a truly global structure.
Fiori holds a PhD in Social Entrepreneurship and Innovation from Brunel Business School and has spent nearly two decades building bridges across academia, activism, policy and industry. She has led or helped secure major European initiatives focused on circular fashion, transparency, reskilling, urban manufacturing and digital transformation, while founding ventures and platforms such as Wear Your Origins, the Fashion Revolution Summer School, the Raise Your Voice Festival against human trafficking, and the relaunch of ZITA Hellas as part of a wider vision for a new Sneaker Factory of the Future in Europe.
Her work asks a deceptively simple question: what if the factory of the future were not hidden at the edge of the world, but returned to the heart of the city as a place of beauty, authorship, repair, learning and community? For Fiori, this is not nostalgia. It is a new operating system for local resilience — one in which AI supports human creativity rather than replacing it, waste becomes raw material for rebirth, and the people behind our clothes are no longer invisible.
She has spoken at the TED red circle and TEDx stages and international platforms including the EU Climate Pact, the New European Bauhaus Festival and European Commission forums, and has been featured by media such as Reuters, BBC, VICE, Vogue and Elle. Whether in a classroom, a policy room, a workshop floor or on a stage, Fiori works to make one thing visible: the future of manufacturing is not only technical. It is moral, cultural and profoundly human.
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Greece (GR)Project cooperation
ReLoop Circular will pilot a digital collect-back and second-life intelligence platform that helps citizens, organisations, public bodies and circular economy actors register products and materials for reuse, before they become waste.