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EVERLEENFORMATION? REFERLANEFISHER? Susan Scow, sustainability impact specialist at Eileen Fisher, doesn’t have a snappy portmanteau for the three-way tie-up between Everlane, Reformation and her brand, but she’s open to suggestions.
While collaboration is far from an off-piste phenomenon in fashion—think Skims x Nike, Levi’s x Barbour and Uniqlo x Marimekko, to name a few—this one is. For one thing, it isn’t a marketing grab to try and sell more clothing. For another, it takes place far further upstream in the supply chain than retailers are wont to link arms. The partnership could even supply a blueprint for a new way of working to help the industry hit its climate goals when money and resources are under strain from a turbulent and unpredictable market.
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It was the Apparel Impact Institute (Aii), a San Francisco-headquartered nonprofit that seeks to identify, fund and scale proven solutions that can decarbonize apparel and footwear manufacturing, that first suggested in 2024 that the three companies tag-team on a handful of strategic suppliers they had in common. In effect co-sponsoring six emissions-reduction programs involving target-setting and low-hanging-fruit tweaks like automating shut-offs to conserve energy and insulating hot water pipes and steam valves.
The idea, Scow said, was to reduce initiative fatigue, both for the suppliers and the brands wrestling with a burgeoning number of regulatory and reporting requirements, not to mention mounting public scrutiny over what they’re doing to combat global warming. Factories are regularly inundated with buyer requests to make their processes more energy efficient by changing light bulbs, upgrading outdated machinery or installing solar panels, all of which comes with a hefty initial monetary outlay. By pooling together their leverage and access to capital, and applying them in a streamlined manner, the brands hoped to alleviate some of those burdens in a way they hadn’t been able to before.
“If we were not collaborating with other brands, we would not be able to access these deeper tiers of the supply chain and make the business case for investing in their decarbonization,” she said. “Without this, I’m not even sure how much we’d be able to engage with Tiers 2 and 3.”
With Foshan Chicley Textile Co., a dyeing and finishing facility that works with mostly cotton, linen and man-made cellulosic fabrics at the heart of the Pearl River Delta in southern China, Eileen Fisher, Everlane, Reformation have agreed to go a step further, by co-funding deeper decarbonization interventions with technical guidance from Aii and its partners, including Reset Carbon, a Hong Kong-based consultancy, and BluWin, a “high-impact” carbon solutions provider from the United Kingdom.
Story Continues“I think that this is a really novel approach, not just to co-nominate these facilities in the first place, like in the in the assessment and the build-up of what the potential is, but taking this next step of coming together to co-invest in the real piece that’s very capital intensive,” said Katina Boutis, senior director of sustainability at sourcing at Everlane. “This is the way that we can actually have really meaningful, tangible, long-term changes. And we’ve certainly heard from suppliers about how tough the industry, especially right now. It takes a lot to get funding mechanisms at a supplier level to be able to transform or make this type of capital improvement.”
That fashion has fewer than five years to reach its Science Based Targets, coupled with ever-contracting budgets due to the continuing volatility of the geoeconomic landscape, drove a high sense of urgency to put the industry’s talk about collective action into practice, said Andrés Bragagnin, Aii’s senior manager of strategic management.
He didn’t have to look very far, however, to find a group of brands that shared the same abhorrence of green window dressing: Eileen Fisher has committed to reducing its Scope 1 and 2 emissions by 100 percent and its Scope 3 emissions by 25 percent by the end of the year; Everlane plans to lower its emission per product by 2030; and Reformation wants to be climate positive by 2025, removing more carbon from the atmosphere than it generates, and fully circular by 2030.
“We were completely flexible to how the brands wanted to approach this from a funding and engagement perspective,” he said. “Once we had a list of factories, we agreed on budgets, and then they provided the outreach to the facility, the buy-in, the commitment to the facility, and then everything is handed over to our programs team to enroll engineers, measure capacity and start the program calendar from assessing all the way to building the deliverables.”
If Scope 3 is where the overwhelming majority of a retailer’s emissions lie, it’s the material processing phase, or Tier 2, of its supply chain that remains the highest source of pollution at 55 percent of total greenhouse gases because of the tremendous energy and chemistry needed to transform fiber into a yarn or a finished fabric, according to Aii. This is followed by raw material extraction (Tier 4) at 21 percent, raw material processing (Tier 3) at 15 percent and finished goods assembly (Tier 1) at 9 percent.
But a brand’s influence, which is strongest at the cutting-and-sewing, or Tier 1, phase, waters down the further up the supply chain it goes. At wet-processing facilities, for instance, brands have no real ownership or influence aside from a volume-driven perspective.
“Before, we were only using the leverage and relationships that Reformation had as an individual brand,” said Carrie Freiman Parry, the It Girl label’s senior director of sustainability. “Now, we’re able to credibly say, ‘Hey it’s not only Reformation that is asking for this,’ and make a real case for why it’s needed at an industry level.”
For Victor Li, general manager at Foshan Chicley Textile Co., engaging with three brands at the same time is new territory. The three brands have slightly different emphases in their decarbonization strategies—he described Eileen Fisher with a laugh as being “extreme sustainable”—which makes it more time-consuming to arrive at a consensus. Having a single set of deliverables in this pre-competitive space, however, makes things easier to manage.
“If everyone’s asking for their own decarbonization project, I’ll work myself to death,” he said. “Some brands may want to do certain things first; others may want to do a little bit later.”
This “coming together” also places suppliers in the center, making them more likely to acquiesce to a decarbonization roadmap, Bragagnin said. Having key buyers align on their sustainability approaches, fundraising and engagement, he said, has been a “huge one” that gets suppliers to buy in quicker than when presented with proposals from individual brands.
“There’s been a lot of fill in this questionnaire, fill in this other digital assessment, fill in this other tool,” he said. “So this has helped reduce that data fatigue and move at an accelerated pace.”
Staying clear of anti-trust concerns by setting up certain boundaries has been easy, as far as Scow is concerned. Nobody divulges what percentage of their volume a supplier might encompass, saying instead whether a factory is strategic for them or not. Everyone in the sustainability teams also has a degree of separation from the product development and design departments, which helps them sidestep potentially sensitive IP, such as products or fabrications. Perhaps one of the biggest hurdles? “Scheduling, literally,” she said. “It’s so hard; we all manage so many different things.”
“On the flip side, it helps to have someone pick up the slack,” Scow added. “If I’m overwhelmed and exhausted and working on something completely over here in this other corner of my work, especially related to human rights, then the ladies from Reformation and Everlane often step in and say, ‘Hey, we dropped the ball collectively. Let’s get something on the calendar.’”
Parry said that broader industry challenges, such as supply chain and sourcing needs, along with team bandwidth, are all things they have to navigate. Identifying potential future opportunities and partners, too, is something that requires effort because not everyone is a Reformation or an Eileen Fisher or an Everlane. By allowing engagement to be brand-led, Aii is also free to do what it’s good at—technical implementation—rather than spending time “working with each brand in a silo and acting as a go-between,” she said.
“We’d love to invite more brands to participate; at some point, we’ll exhaust our list of shared suppliers,” Parry said. “We’ll need more brands to join the collaboration so that we can continue these streamlined decarbonization projects across different supply chains.”
And it’s not only the three brands that will benefit. All the retailers who buy from the suppliers their collaboration covers will get a boost as well. It may sound counterintuitive to help out a rival at your own cost, but finding opportunities to create much wider social and environmental impacts “fortifies and strengthens our industry,” particularly during lean times, Boutis said. “We’ll be able to quantify within our own product carbon footprints, but it will also be a much more meaningful ripple effect across the rest of the industry,” she said. “I keep reminding myself and anybody that I talk to about this that we all work in a shared supply chain in one way or another, and I think that is what’s driving this work—and what’s most important. So hopefully this is a highly replicable thing, and if we can do it, I think anyone can do it.”
This article appeared in Sourcing Journal’s Sustainability Report. To download the full report, click here.
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