Sustainability Director for a Fashion Company

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For today, we're talking about the former: the environmental sort of sustainability. In recent years, major clothes brands like H&K, Kering, Adidas, and Nike have made a large deal of the strides they've fabricated in this area, marketing "green" collections and publishing long sustainability reports to lay out their goals and log their almanac progress. They've installed leadership to take the reins on this try, too, often giving them the attention-grabbing title of Master Sustainability Officer.

Despite the visibility of these companies' efforts to reduce their footprints, or at least to go far look like they're doing so, the mechanisms of sustainable business are far from self-evident, which makes it a lot harder to discern which companies are doing right past the planet and which aren't.

Photograph: John Lamparski/GettyImages

In the interest of working through the murk — and in laurels of Black Friday, the highest high holiday of consumerism in the United states and the truest antithesis of a sustainable lifestyle — nosotros're taking a look at what Chief Sustainability Officers do, how they fit into larger company structures, and what they tin can realistically accomplish.

What is a Chief Sustainability Officer?

The first thing to know about the role of Chief Sustainability Officer (CSO) is that it's not a standard title across the clothes industry in the way that Chief Executive Officer is. Nike has a CSO, Hannah Jones, who reports to the CEO and the President of Innovation. Adidas has a Global Director of Social and Ecology Affairs, Frank Henke, who manages a seventy-person team around the world and reports to the Full general Counsel and, in turn, the CEO. H&G has a Head of Sustainability, Anna Gedde.

Robert Strand, the executive director of the Center for Responsible Business organisation at UC Berkeley'south Haas School of Business, studies the emergence of CSOs and says that it can be difficult to pivot downwardly who fills that role at different companies because it might be designated by a host of related terms, like "corporate social responsibility" or "corporate citizenship." Case in signal: Nike first created a VP of Corporate Responsibility position in 1998, before renaming it a few times and ultimately landing on Chief Sustainability Officer in 2014.

Reformation's final product, the Gemma dress. Photo: Reformation

The job isn't compatible across the manufacture only because it's incredibly new. Strand says the CSO role started popping up in the final decade, and even then, mainly in the last five years.

So what does sustainability leadership really do? For Kathleen Talbot, the head of sustainability and concern operations at Reformation, reducing the young brand'due south impact on the planet ways getting into the nitty gritty of every aspect of the business organization to find opportunities to be more efficient or do things differently. The projects she leads are as varied as mapping Reformation'due south chemical science supply chain — identifying the thousands of components in the fabric dyes the brand uses in guild to figure out how to reduce pollution — and edifice a RefScale calculator to quantify the water used and CO2 produced in the making of a garment. Her team is working on a similar calculator for stores.

"If yous don't measure it, you can't set up it," Talbot explains. Interim as a sort of sustainability auditor is so important that she recently hired an analyst to handle the numbers full-time. She's at present looking to bring on a sustainability communications manager, who volition assistance customers understand the full scope of Reformation'southward piece of work in this area, and someone to fill up a social and environmental compliance function.

As Talbot'due south intimacy with Reformation's overall business indicates, sustainability isn't merely about the planet. "At its foundation, the concept of corporate sustainability involves corporations' taking into consideration their environmental and social impacts in concert with their economic objectives," Strand writes in a 2013 research paper titled "Strategic Leadership of Corporate Sustainability." This means that a CSO is less of a solitary environmental warrior, or police officeholder, and more than of a team member who's working toward the same financial goals equally everyone else.

Sustainability has its sexier applications, too, which are usually the ones making the news. In an electronic mail, Nike's Hannah Jones calls out her employer's super lightweight Flyknit sneakers, the fruits of a design challenge to create a high-performance shoe with as trivial waste material as possible. (The model wound up cutting waste by 60 pct.) Her team is currently looking into business models that can proceed materials in play through recycling. A T-shirt could get another shirt, then a shoe, and then another shoe. That'south a somewhat more afar and hard goal, though.

Nike's Flyknit sneaker. Photo: Mike Lawrie/Getty Images

"This will take massive system change across our entire industry because efficiency alone won't become united states there," Jones writes.

How do they work with the rest of the company?

In many means, Talbot is lucky that Reformation is a small, privately held company that was even smaller when she joined. She says that founder and CEO Yael Aflalo made it clear that she wanted her to exist in the field making business operations decisions, rather than simply monitoring others' work. First that meant managing Reformation's facilities on the day-to-mean solar day and setting them upward for efficiency, so moving on to work in the production infinite on sourcing fabrics.

Because Reformation was so minor and structurally flat at the beginning, it was possible for Talbot to work like this — she was simply an operations director who also had the explicit responsibility to brand the company as sustainable every bit possible.

Photo: Zheng Peng/Getty Images

At a larger company that was not founded with an eye toward the environment, a CSO might not have the same level of authority.

"CSOs near always have very, very pocket-sized teams and frequently comparatively limited resources where they must typically work beyond the organization to implement their modify initiatives," Strand writes in an email. "This means they must be very effective at influencing others without formal 'difficult ability' equally the people with whom they are working almost never written report to the CSO."

It helps if a company trains every employee to act with sustainability in mind. Patagonia, famously, is i such place. "Because of our mission statement, it'southward a office of everybody's job," says Lisa Expressway, the California-based brand's VP of environmental activism. That mission argument — "Build the best product, cause no unnecessary damage, employ business to inspire and implement solutions to the ecology crunch" — is also carved onto a wooden plaque that hangs above the door of the cafeteria in Patagonia headquarters, keeping it meridian of mind for anyone going for a snack.

Patagonia encourages (and funds) its employees to leave for upwardly to ii months to intern with the ecology group of their choice, Throughway says, and has a longstanding tradition of altruistic one percent of sales to grassroots organizations on the front end lines of protecting the air, soil, and water and that piece of work on climate change, sustainable agriculture, and culling energy. Patagonia staffers can volunteer to exist on groups that review proposals to get that money out the door.

Though the company has an ecology and social responsibleness section, everyone is effectively a member of that team.

The limitations of the job

In many ways, Patagonia is a unicorn. It's besides a private company, pregnant information technology doesn't take the same mandate to demonstrate year-over-year growth that publicly traded corporations like H&Thou and Nike have. Those companies, peculiarly the fast fashion brands that operate at massive scale around the earth and avowal super low prices, are of course the ones that virtually demand to run efficiently and sustainably, while creating mechanisms for recycling their article of clothing.

Photograph: Justin Sullivan/Getty Images

But economics come first, and that can put a damper on the environmental and social wings of the and so-called "triple lesser line."

"Brands still want to turn a profit and all of these wonderful things that sustainability officers want to implement price money. The margins on environmentally-conscious materials and processing aren't as loftier as the margins on conventional materials," Lyndsay McGregor, a senior editor at Sourcing Journal, writes in an email. "And consumers don't seem willing to pay a little extra for something that's sustainable. Then if brands can't laissez passer on some of that additional cost, they're less likely to exist enthusiastic nigh making big changes until consumers start demanding that they do so."

Strand has found that a company'southward overall civilization might arrive more or less open up to making changes toward sustainability.

"The companies that tend to be the most receptive to suggestions for change are oft those that promote a 'culture of candor,' openness, cooperation, and a healthy degree of humility. In such companies, individuals embrace the ambulation of unresolved problems and potentially looming challenges," Strand writes in an email. "It can oft be the CSO identifying many of these problems and challenges and bringing them into the organization to address."