Here’s How Marketers Accelerate Fashion’s Sustainable Transition

Fashion brands and marketers have a new roadmap for sustainable transformation.

Incorporating buzzy practices, including regenerative agriculture and circularity, companies like Outerknown, J. Crew Group and VF Corporation are demonstrating the benefits of progress in several of the 12 areas of transformation laid out in a new report from Accenture.

But there’s a gulf between what the economic system incentivizes and what must happen to pull clothing manufacturing within the planetary boundaries. The industry remains reliant on extractive inputs for products that have become consumer favorites. And without any regulatory enforcement, experts told Adweek, it’s unlikely that the industry at large will elect to make the necessary changes highlighted in the report.

Still, marketers have a unique role to play in better brand decision-making through their involvement in consumer labeling, packaging and circularity. Brands have important decision-making power when it comes to carbon emissions, supply chain and workers’ rights—all of which are outlined in Accenture’s new report.

Outlining levers for change

The report highlights a dozen different “action areas of transformation,” outlining near-term and longer-term goals for each category. The list of categories includes:

• Carbon and net zero
• Materials, regenerative agriculture and biodiversity
• Water and chemicals
• Circularity, waste and redefining growth
• Plastics and packaging
• Traceability and transparency
• Consumer engagement and labeling
• Worker and human rights
• Empowerment, education and digital wages
• Justice, equity, inclusion and diversity
• Supply chain
• Transportation and logistics

The report, Accenture’s second on sustainable fashion, aims to provide a useful roadmap to brands at different levels of maturity when it comes to sustainable practices, explained Frank Zambrelli, managing director at Accenture Retail ESG, executive director of the Responsible Business Coalition at Fordham University’s Gabelli School of Business and a lead author on the report.

“People are finding operational improvements and efficiencies and actual savings” as a result of implementing sustainable practices, Zambrelli noted. While some of the necessary changes are costly, at least in the short term, others are good for the bottom line.

“There’s this new era of ESG or sustainability being this tool in my toolbox of business management, not simply in the mitigation of negative impacts,” he said.

Funding regenerative agriculture

Highlighted as a case study within the report, J. Crew Group, parent company of Madewell, is working on a regenerative cotton program to diversify suppliers and implement practices that improve soil health and sequester carbon.

“With denim at the core of our business, it quickly became clear to us at Madewell that we needed an end-to-end denim sustainability strategy,” said Liz Hershfield, svp, head of sustainability at J.Crew Group. “We saw the importance that regenerative agriculture could play in our holistic approach to materials, bettering both the people and the planet.”

Apparel brand Outerknown, which wasn’t involved in Accenture’s report, spoke with Adweek on its work in regenerative farming and soil health.

Founded in 2015 with sustainability as its mission, its programs in regenerative agriculture, water conservation and paper-based packaging all give some insight into what the report’s levers for change look like in action.

“We’re actually able to identify, [for] each step of the supply chain, where it takes place,” explained Dylon Shepelsky, senior manager of R&D and product development at Outerknown. That goes all the way down to the level of lot numbers—or where, on each farm, a bale of cotton comes from, he said.

Storytelling around these initiatives, as Vans has done on social, is a key way that marketers have a role in fueling a sustainable transformation for fashion.

Industry roadblocks exist—sometimes by design

In the wider industry, many brands aren’t motivated—or even built with the capacity to—reach the levels of innovation that Outerknown and Madewell are working toward.

Thriving fast fashion companies with sprawling, global supply chains are the product of a system that devalues fair labor and climate-friendly processes while failing to hold brands accountable for the environmental harm they inflict.

That reality proves the need for regulatory action, according to Ken Pucker, senior lecturer on sustainable business dynamics at The Fletcher School at Tufts University. Pucker has worked with brands and stakeholders on the New York Fashion Act, which would hold companies accountable for the labor practices and climate impacts within their supply chains.

“The only way to get the floor lifted isn’t by saying, ‘I make great stuff, you all should too,’” he said. “It’s by lifting the floor for what the regulatory minimum is.” Doing that, he argued, could usher in a new kind of industry-wide collaboration—because everyone has to meet the same basic standards.