HanesBrands’ Chris Fox On The Supply Chain and The Future of Retail

… Invest in your employees and local communities. From providing safe, rewarding jobs with competitive wages and benefits to valuing and celebrating our diversity — it’s all about being the kind of company where people genuinely come first and where customers would be proud to shop.

As part of our series about the future of retail, I had the pleasure of interviewing Chris Fox, Chief Sustainability Officer at HanesBrands Inc.

Chris Fox has led global corporate social responsibility and sustainability programs at HanesBrands since 2005 and is responsible for developing and overseeing the company’s comprehensive sustainability strategy, including operational policies and internal and external programs. His areas of focus have included Hanes’ ethics, diversity and inclusion, factory compliance, product safety, environmental sustainability and philanthropy programs. With his many years in the sustainability space, Chris is now the brand’s first chief sustainability officer responsible for driving HanesBrands toward its 2030 sustainability goals outlined in detail at www.HBISustains.com. Chris joined the organization in 1999 and has also held several roles within the HanesBrands legal function, including representing the supply chain and Asia business development teams. He earned a Bachelor of Arts degree from the College of William and Mary and his J.D. and MBA degrees from Wake Forest University.

Thank you so much for joining us in this interview series! Before we dive in, our readers would love to learn a bit more about you. Can you tell us a story about what brought you to this specific career path?

It might surprise some to learn that I started my career in the legal field. I often think about the legal landscape as a microcosm for society — the challenges that rise to the surface and the answers we ultimately define help to shape the direction of our world. That’s one of the core reasons I went into the profession — I wanted to make a difference in how businesses operate and help them do the right thing. Since 2005, for me, doing the right thing has meant helping to solve the complex tests we face in corporate responsibility and sustainability.

Can you share the most rewarding story that happened to you since you started your career?

HanesBrands sponsors a high school GED program for Associates in Central America and the Dominican Republic. I was able to attend a graduation ceremony for sewing machine operators and a woman who started the program unable to read, presented at the ceremony and read the commencement speech aloud. It was an unbelievably moving experience.

Over the years, thousands of associates have graduated from this program. This initiative is heavily funded by our philanthropic Green for Good program, which aims to provide our most vulnerable communities with educational opportunities, disaster relief, medical care and infrastructure improvements.

Financial support for Green for Good is funded through the selling of plant floor waste that we originally used to discard.

Are you working on any new exciting projects now? How do you think that might help people?

At HanesBrands’ Inc., doing what’s right is one of our core values. It’s part of our DNA and we’ve been striving to always do the right thing day in and day out since our company was founded more than 100 years ago. We’re committed to doing our part to make the world a more comfortable place for everybody and to make that happen, we’re focusing on these three pillars:

• People — Caring for people is in our roots. Which is why we’re focusing on targeted and impactful programs around the themes of comfort, inclusion and health for our employees and our global communities.
• Planet — We are taking bigger and bolder action to minimize our impact on the planet and help our people and communities thrive. Which is why we’re aggressively pursuing our new science-based targets to further create and implement meaningful change.
• Product — As a company that helps clothe the world, we understand that we have an impact on the environment throughout the lifecycle of our products. Our aspiration is to completely phase out single-use plastic in our product packaging by 2025 and any that does remain must be commonly recyclable or compostable.

None of us are able to achieve success without some help along the way. Is there a particular person to whom you are grateful, who helped get you to where you are? Can you share a story?

When I was in law school, I had a mentor who also coached my mock trial advocacy team. He taught me how to think on my feet and gave me the confidence to communicate effectively. I actually ended up going to work at his firm and he’s been a mentor, colleague, and friend ever since.

How have you used your success to bring goodness to the world?

We’ve been invested in the sustainability space for decades. With HanesBrands products in 9 out of 10 households, we’ve been able to impact millions of lives through our work, which includes acting aggressively to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and for more sustainable product materials and packaging, as well as through a range of philanthropic partnerships, including with Historic Black Colleges and Universities.

Recently, we announced a four-year partnership with HBCUs North Carolina A&T, Pensole Lewis College of Business & Design and Winston-Salem State University to provide scholarships and internships to students to have the opportunities and experience needed to succeed and help build a diverse and inclusive workforce.

Ok super. Now let’s jump to the main questions of our interview. The pandemic has changed many aspects of all of our lives. One of them is the fact that so many of us have gotten used to shopping almost exclusively online. Can you share a few examples of different ideas that large retail outlets are implementing to adapt to the new realities created by the pandemic?

During the height of the pandemic, we saw an acceleration in consumer shopping from in-store to e-commerce and through this we learned that consumers are more interested than ever in sustainable product packaging. That’s been a driver for us to work with retailers to rethink how we package and ship products to the e-commerce consumer through a financial and sustainability lens.

More specifically, we’re interested in partnering with our major retailers, to reinvent how product is packaged and delivered to the consumer without unnecessary waste, especially in e-commerce. This is an industry-wide issue that we can’t fix alone, and we look forward to collaboration with other like-minded companies and customers.

The supply chain crisis is another outgrowth of the pandemic. Can you share a few examples of what retailers are doing to pivot because of the bottlenecks caused by the supply chain crisis?

At HanesBrands, one of the ways we balance quality with cost is through the ownership of nearly 70% of our supply chain. This gives us a significant advantage when it comes to visibility and control that other companies may not have. Notably, having a balanced supply chain with significant capacity across both the eastern and western hemispheres has turned out to be a sizeable advantage as well. I’m proud of what we’ve done as a company to help keep our associates healthy and safe during the pandemic. And I’m extremely grateful for the way our supply chain associates met every challenge that came their way over the past two years.

How do you think we should reimagine our supply chain to prevent this from happening again in the future?

Echoing what we discussed previously, our largely owned and balanced supply chain model has given us tremendous advantages. For example, since 2007 our work to reduce greenhouse gases and energy use in our owned facilities has yielded $265M in savings. Further, the company continues to challenge the status quo, recently signing a purchase power agreement for their Dos Rios facility in the Dominican Republic, making it one of the largest textile mills in the world to be powered entirely by renewable energy.

With that, we certainly see our future driven by a similar model.

In your opinion, will retail stores or malls continue to exist? How would you articulate the role of physical retail spaces at a time when online commerce platforms like Amazon Prime or Instacart can deliver the same day or the next day?

That’s a great question. As I noted previously, we’re seeing changing consumer behavior and it’s important that businesses meet customers how and where they’re shopping.

This brings me to our Full Potential Plan, which includes a strong focus in investing in our people, brands and supply chain to offer our products with outstanding value and style how, when and where consumers like to shop.

So, I think that means that both online and in-store shopping can co-exist to provide consumers with multiple ways to shop — We’ll meet the consumer where they are.

The so-called “Retail Apocalypse” has been going on for about a decade. While many retailers are struggling, some retailers, like Lululemon, Kroger, and Costco are quite profitable. Can you share a few lessons that other retailers can learn from the success of profitable retailers?

Although different business practices work for different retailers, I’d echo my last thought on trying to meet consumers where they are, and also responding to the demands for sustainability.

At HanesBrands, we help make doing what’s right an easy and affordable choice for our consumers. By balancing cost with value, we strive to make sustainability accessible to all.

Amazon is going to exert pressure on all of retail for the foreseeable future. New Direct-To-Consumer companies based in China are emerging that offer prices that are much cheaper than US and European brands. What would you advise to retail companies and e-commerce companies, for them to be successful in the face of such strong competition?

I really can’t speak for other companies. But I can say that we are focused on delivering outstanding products at great value when and where the consumer wants to shop. And we continue striving to make sustainability accessible to all.

Based on your experience and success, what are the five most important things one should know in order to create a fantastic retail experience that keeps bringing customers back for more? Please share an example for each.

1. Consumers want to know they’re doing good when they shop. Focus on key pillars like People, Planet and Product to ensure a surround-sound approach of doing good.
2. Meet the consumer where they are and how they like to shop.
3. Consumers are more invested in sustainable product purchases than ever. Invest to amplify your environmental performance.
4. Invest in your employees and local communities. From providing safe, rewarding jobs with competitive wages and benefits to valuing and celebrating our diversity — it’s all about being the kind of company where people genuinely come first and where customers would be proud to shop.
5. At HanesBrands, we recognize that a transparent view into our operations, systems, processes and products is the demand of many today. Commit to transparency and invite others to review these disclosures.

Thank you for all of that. We are nearly done. Here is our final ‘meaty’ question. You are a person of great influence. If you could start a movement that would bring the most amount of good to the most amount of people, what would that be? You never know what your idea can trigger.

Definitely the Wash Cold movement. If the consumer wants to make the greatest impact possible on the environment, I’d urge them to always wash with cold water.

How can our readers further follow your work?

I’m not the most active on social media but you can certainly follow me on LinkedIn and if you’re interested in keeping up to date on all things HanesBrands Inc. Sustainability, visit HBISustains.com

This was very inspiring. Thank you so much for joining us!