The Sustainability S-Curve
While usually skeptical on the fashion industry’s capacity to meet the Climate Challenge, I feel we could be at an inflection point. It’s, of course, very late, but at least we are getting there. Why? We’ve reached a moment where large brands can no longer slap a conscious label on a capsule collection and loudly proclaim their environmental credibility. Customers are more and more knowledgeable about the topic. Policymakers are finally rallying around potential legislation to curb fashion’s impact, and most importantly, climate change is now impossible to deny. All those factors will combine to finally reach mass scale of (more) sustainable fashion products. The billion-ton carbon question is when? Will it be in 2–3 years or in 10?
In September 2019, our firm launched a sustainability transformation effort. We started from almost nothing (aka representative of most of the fashion industry) and began the tough work of changing every part of our business from the ground up, in our own way. There’s still a lot of work to do on our side, but I’m confident we’ll get there. Why does our journey matter? It shows how it’s possible to transform a legacy business in less than 5 years (instead of endless 10–20 year targets that lack any accountability). Also our journey is unfortunately not the one of fashion incumbents…
To start with, fashion incumbents are still missing the importance of making sustainable fashion more accessible. The industry is still ignoring the need to rein in every part of their value chain to make things more affordable. In the meantime, many efforts are going in the wrong direction: just google image search ‘sustainable fashion’ or look at every article about the topic.
Our industry needs to move more quickly than ever to make sustainable fashion accessible to a wider audience. We are at a critical moment, and it’s time to push the industry forward to the next phase of its sustainability journey. The fashion players that are missing this trend will be disrupted in the next 5 years by the people that got it. Let me explain why.
The S Curve
The S-Curve is a concept often referred to in tracking penetration of new technologies and innovation. It maps out how new innovations have a fairly linear, slower growth trajectory during their early adoption. After that initial phase, there is an exponential phase of growth where a greater portion of customers begin to take part, until the technology reaches relative maturity. This framework is typically used for new innovations being introduced to the market (think mobile phones and how the iPhone was the catalyst for exponential growth), but sustainable fashion represents a challenge-driven S-Curve rather than a technology-driven one. It wasn’t a new technology that spurred the development of the sector–it was the threat of climate change that drove early movement. This creates unique dynamics for how things are playing out.
Phase 1 — The Early Activist Adopters
Early sustainable fashion brands were driven by the environmental movement instead of some new technological advancement. These early brands looked to invent new ways of making and selling clothing. The community and consumer demand grew steadily over the past few decades, but remained far from achieving widespread adoption.
Expensive or niche brands helped push forward the gradual development of fiber and product innovation, but everything remained geared towards a very subset of the population. Patagonia is the perfect example of this: they pushed forward the topic of making clothes in a better way, but at a price point and overall aesthetic that was still targeted at a very specific customer. And Patagonia could even be considered a mainstream brand relative to many of the ultra-niche, ultra-luxury sustainable fashion brands that came out of this era.
Phase 2 — The Early Majority: From PR-driven actions to a sizable business opportunity
This is the typical phase of the S-Curve where innovation spreads to a much larger population, and the growth slope turns upwards. This period can feel a bit like the wild west (remember the rush to get N95 masks at the beginning of the Covid crisis?). This is where the Sustainable Fashion industry is today. An increasing number of PR-driven efforts and little (but tangible) genuine, widespread progress.
This is where brands might do something like airship an organic cotton product which will make customers feel good but ignore the overall carbon impact. As consumer demand increases and becomes more sophisticated, people will gradually filter the good stuff from the bad.
But this phase also creates momentum for the next phase: more resources, more creativity, smarter processes, more business cases or opportunities to stop constantly weighing the complex trade-off of COGS in sustainable production.
For us to move up the curve towards the next phase, we have to overcome the risk of greenwashing that would damage irremediably customers trust and therefore scalability of next phase. Too many brands, -in order to sell a few more products or looks cool- are still engaging in stretching the truth. And so far, they had little incentive to be good corporate citizens. Therefore the recent backlash to exaggerated claims, and aggressive actions of various government bodies like the FTC and the EU are much welcome: time to kick out the free riders of the sustainability!
Phase 3 : Scale! Competitive Advantage & Business-as-Usual
This is the phase where we hope to help push the industry into — we need the average consumer to buy sustainable fashion! This is where all businesses recognize the strategic imperative to sell sustainable products, have adapted their operations accordingly and larger segments of consumers shop this way.
If we all start moving faster, we can get there sooner (ie from 2024–25 onwards) than later (ie around 2030). Note that most industry pledge take 2030 as a reference points, which is a good indication of level of ambition of the industry on the topic! Hopefully customers & regulators will force to raise the bar !
Based on my experience, there are two traps to avoid though to reach this phase:
Don’t bet on the Green premium
For too long, there has been the conventional wisdom that sustainable products would sell for a higher price point. Therefore brands have built their business around this myth. This will be less true as we are moving into a mass market games.
Fight the Green Opacity
Transparency is a term that’s often thrown around in the conversation, but is much easier said than done. This is the hard, often thankless, work of measurement, data collection, and processing. There is little short term and public facing benefit, how your products are made, and moved around. But this is a critical element to make things credible in customers eyes… and avoid backlash with various stakeholders in the future. But this is indeed hard and most of the legacy tools (from audit to technology) are ill adapted to this complexity.
To get there, the industry will need to be under intense pressure from their customers, the regulators and their employees.
The fashion industry will also have to find a more collaborative way of working. You’ll see more and more genuine partnerships between up-and-coming innovators and larger, scaled brands. In Phase 2, these partnerships were limited: a PR play, mostly experimental or stuck into the usual runaround of a cozy industry that makes headlines but no impact (I put most coalition of fashion brands in this bucket unfortunately).
To reach phase 3 of scaled sustainable Fashion, brands will have to reinvent themselves and new innovative players will unlock new opportunities around transparency or operations. Startups like Common Share, EcoFashion Corp, Evolved By Nature, Carbon Facts or Ever Dye will propel fashion brands forward (disclaimer: Adore Me is piloting projects with all of them). We are talking of 50% carbon impact reduction, while most of projects you heard about in the fashion press will reduce total footprint by less than 1%.
When our team begin our transformation in 2019 we were both inspired and discouraged. There were so many positive isolated developments, competing against so many collective impediments to real progress. Today I am optimistic. We’ve seen firsthand how making your organization more sustainable at every level can help you operate more efficiently, and bring better products to more consumers. Our industry is at a tipping point, and it’s up to each and every one of us to help push forward in making sustainability become business as usual sooner than later! Time for disruption!
