Janice Sullivan is a veteran of the cut-and-thrust world of international fashion, but the ex-Calvin Klein Jeans president’s latest role requires her to juggle factory inspections and design meetings with keeping tabs on oxen counts in northern Uganda.

As the new CEO of Edun, the ethical fashion brand launched by singer Bono and his wife Ali Hewson five years ago, Sullivan’s task is to make Edun as effective at shifting designer goods and turning a profit as the fashion brands whose only mission is catwalk success and a healthy bottom line. At Edun, though, she has to do that within the limits imposed by the company’s ambition to alleviate poverty through thoughtful trade. That means using only factories that abide by Edun’s rules on fair treatment for staff, and sourcing materials and using processes in ways that are ethically driven. And it means ensuring cotton growers in Uganda have enough oxen.

Sullivan’s appointment came shortly ahead of news that LVMH had bought a 49% stake in Edun, developments that together mark a turning point not just in Edun’s prospects but in what it means to be luxurious. Hewson readily concedes that the business had been drifting – full of worthy intentions but with few results: factories providing employment and hope in Africa were opened and later closed. Hewson and Sullivan are coy about how much money the company went through in its early years – it was reportedly around the $11.5m mark – instead Sullivan says that with the investment from LVMH and the support it provides on everything from legal and finance to clearing customs in difficult countries, Edun should be profitable “quite soon … in the next four years”. Its eventual success will prove to the rest of the high-end fashion business that ethics and profits can co-exist.

The new boss is diplomatic about what was lacking at the pre-Sullivan Edun and the markets they were producing in: “It’s a complete soup-to-nuts combination of skill-sets, logistics, actual know-how, financing … all these things need to come together to make the value chain, and all of it has some broken part in Africa. You might get a great factory but they don’t have the financing, or you’ve got great financing but you don’t have the skills. Then you have landlocked countries that have to deal with corruption to get things to the border, and the weather. There are myriad complications, and fashion works on a calendar.”

Sullivan adds: “I come from a corporate environment, I do things by the book, I have had many, many years of experience in fashion and understand what it takes for a company to get there, and I don’t think Edun had it. They were being pulled in lots of different directions, and success is as much about what you say ‘no’ to.”

Hewson is frank about the struggles of running a business on Africa time. “It’s been a steep learning curve for the last five years,” she says. “The reality of producing and delivering on time into world-class department stores and meeting deadlines is a very tough business. We had part of our collection stuck in Kenya when the Kenyan riots happened, and we’ve had trouble in Madagascar with government changes. It’s very hard to explain to Selfridges that, actually, 25% of your delivery isn’t here.”

Edun has been inspired by the success of other brands drawing on the skills of African craftspeople and determined to work in a way that benefits needy communities. Nairobi-based jewellery and accessories company Made supplies Topshop and John Lewis with goods that use African materials and skills; Soko Kenya, a garment producer that describes itself as ethical, green and for sustainable livelihoods, is another source of encouragement for Edun’s mission.

But Sullivan is adamant that if Edun is to be a successful global brand, it must be first about fashion, and then about helping Africa. “The primary thing is to set the aesthetic,” she says. “The more successful you are at this, the more successful you are at that. To drive excitement and love for the clothes drives all these different programmes.” So, while T-shirts are made in Africa, and all Edun’s denim is out of Africa, the target for the first Spring-Summer collection under Sullivan is only for 20% of production to be in Africa. “Whether we’ll get that, I don’t know,” she says. The rest is manufactured in Asia and South America.

How the company decides where to invest and how to help communities is now down to a chief mission officer, who guides board decisions on aid – things like bed nets to combat malaria, and scholarships – along with the trade decisions. While some projects involve donating profits – as is the case with a T-shirt range designed by school children in Kibera, Kenya – Edun’s policy isn’t generally one of sending a percentage of takings to a worthy cause. Aid is necessary, Hewson says, so that there’s a healthy workforce, but the primary focus is on trade. “They want to be able to build their own roads, their own schools, they want to be able to feed and educate their own children and provide their own healthcare,” she says of Africans. “They’re very thankful for what they’ve received but it’s important to understand how enthusiastic and willing they are to work.”

For Hewson, this is clearly a personal mission. She and Bono hardly need to make money out of this, and she’s never more animated than when talking about the delight of a mother-of-eight, Ugandan cotton producer who’s now earning enough to send her children to school. But the reason Edun will be a successful business, she says, is because it’s what the buying public wants.

“The consumer is driving this idea more than we are – they want clothes that have more than just design, and meaning is the new luxury,” she says. “I think we’re all now very conscious of cause and effect. Big business changes when the consumer demands it, so it will become part of the new way of doing business.”

Edun is not a lone voice singing this song. In 2007, designer Tom Ford said ethical luxury would be a growing force, defining buyers as people with human and environmental consciences. “Luxury is not going out of style. It needs to change its style,” he said. “We need to replace hollow with deep.”

Bain & Company partner and luxury market analyst Claudia D’Arpizio says an ethical dimension to luxury brands has largely been lacking, and while there have been charity sponsorships and support for green events, no brand or group has yet emerged as “really authentic” in presenting its ethical credentials. This is missing a trick, she says, as the shift towards ethical consumption becomes what D’Arpizio calls a “consumer megatrend”, and one that will persist even after recession- induced frugality wears off.

In the same way that high-end consumers are buying home appliances because they’re water-saving or energy efficient, ethical considerations are increasingly becoming a component of the purchase decision. But part of the problem, D’Arpizio says, is that while consumers want ethics, they’re not generally willing to pay extra for them. The Centre for Retail Research has found that British consumers are currently paying a 44% price premium for green retail products. Although this premium is expected to drop to 36% in the next two years, it will still be high enough to prevent many potential buyers from following their conscience.

Ethical fashion is therefore a tough business to be in. One recent casualty was ethical fashion retailer Adili, which ran into cash problems at the end of last year. The company, trading as Ascension online, was sold for just £1 to online entrepreneur Luke Heron, who runs ethical nursery supplies e-tailer Green Baby.

D’Arpizio says an ethical brand story only resonates with consumers if it rings true to the brand, and doesn’t sound like it’s just a slogan to catch the zeitgeist. “Consumers are very much able to recognise which are just marketing campaigns and which are real to the brand,” she says. Acquiring start-up ethical or green brands therefore makes sense for large luxury groups.

Sullivan bristles at the suggestion that LVMH’s ideals might be at odds with those of Edun. “They didn’t take Edun to destroy what it stands for, they took it on because it’s an amazing idea and it’s the future of luxury.” She says the group has always been very ethically driven; it just hasn’t publicised the fact. The LVMH Group, as well as providing funding for the arts – traditional philanthropic territory for luxury goods makers – supports the Claude Pompidou Foundation helping the elderly and disabled in France, along with a development fund in Haiti and several humanitarian foundations in the US.

Hewson is determined that Edun will be a contributor to LVMH’s bottom line as well as its social conscience; her work is not to be LVMH’s corporate social responsibility project.

“We’re a for-profit business, not a charity,” Hewson insists. “We really wanted the company to be able to function just like any other company. That was important not so much to us but for the Africans because they don’t want another handout. They don’t need a hug; they want business.

“Making a profit makes a statement to the rest of the fashion world – that you’re a company that can do this, and that they can do it. It’s important for the fashion community to see that you can make a profit and be thoughtful in the areas you’re working in.”