Innovation Fieldnotes: Sustainable Fashion with Sofia Rainaldi
Sofia Rainaldi is a Kellogg MMM student from Denver, Colorado. She recommends: This Alison Roman salmon recipe that will make you seem like a “real chef”; Business of Fashion; and In America, by Susan Sontag.
When Sofia Rainaldi told me her journey in the fashion industry started with an Instagram DM, my first thought was “this makes sense”. Sofia is a fiercely creative thinker — of course her career started so unconventionally. When she graduated from Dartmouth College with an Art History degree, she was looking for the creative energy that she found in her experiences at contemporary art galleries and museums, with the pace that a start-up could provide.
Post Instagram DM, Sofia found herself at MM LaFleur, a women’s workwear brand. Her first roles on the Logistics and Merchandising teams helped her learn “the spine of the business”. Her constant cross-functional collaboration provided a deep dive into the operations that underpin a fashion brand. After building an understanding of how the business worked, she wanted to focus on bringing the story behind MM LaFleur’s products to life. Sofia joined the Creative team, which focused on “anything customers see that aren’t the actual clothes” — from the website to the packaging. It was with this holistic understanding that she eventually worked with the Sustainability team, focused on implementing MM LaFleur’s sustainability strategy.
As I spoke with Sofia, it became clear that her deep understanding of both ‘the spine’ and ‘the story’ of the fashion industry is differentiating. It shapes her view of what’s needed to make an impact in sustainable fashion and positions her well to be a part of that change.
Change and innovation are what’s desperately needed in the fashion industry. According to the UN’s IPCC, to limit global warming to relatively safe levels, greenhouse gas emissions would need to be cut by 43% by 2030 and carbon emissions would need to reach net zero by 2050. It’s a code-red situation, and the fashion industry has a key role to play. The fashion industry is responsible for 10% of global carbon dioxide output and a 5th of global plastic production — a growing source of oil demand and microplastic pollution.
This isn’t news to the industry — over the past several years we’ve seen brands from H&M to Kerring (parent company to Gucci and Balenciaga) build sustainability strategies. A theme I heard repeatedly from Sofia is that the strategy is just the first step. The impact is in the execution, and execution will require both operational improvements and the ability to deeply listen to and communicate with consumers. Spine and story; story and spine.
Operational Execution
With so many points of environmentally harmful practices within the fashion industry, it’s difficult to create, let alone execute on a sustainability strategy.
- Material Production: There has been a lot of innovation in the high-cost material space, e.g., leather and silk, largely because they are such high-cost materials — it’s easy to wrap the cost of sustainable practices into the price of goods. However, for low-cost items like cotton, or plastic buttons, there hasn’t been as much change, and the economics of those products don’t incentivize sustainable production. The dyeing process is also environmentally harmful. Dyeing has very high heating requirements and is responsible for a large portion of microplastic pollution.
- Garment Design: During Sofia’s time with the Sustainability team at MM LaFleur, she saw the iterations and design work that went into developing the eco-friendly versions of some of their most popular products. Creating garments with new fabrics can completely change the feel of an item, from the way it stretches, wrinkles, and drapes. To successfully launch a sustainability collection, the clothes need to maintain the same level of quality.
- Garment Disposal: The number of garments made each year is estimated to have doubled since 2000. At the end of life, an estimated 85% of textiles are disposed of each year — either through burning or landfills, typically in the Global South.
To create a holistic sustainability program, a brand needs to identify these challenges, address them, and track the impact of the changes. It’s daunting. Thankfully, innovation is happening in these spaces, and Sofia has immersed herself in this world. Her passion for the industry’s potential was evident as she spoke about fabric innovation advancements.
Two examples she shared were Modern Synthesis, a start-up using bacteria to weave and color textiles; and Rubi Labs, a start-up using enzymes to sequester carbon and create a cellulose pulp that can be used to create fabric. This is a space where Sofia has noticed a lot of collaboration between designers and scientists, which is key. Within the supply chain, one of the biggest opportunity areas is transparency — it’s hard to make progress on sustainability commitments if you have no visibility into the carbon impact across a garment’s life cycle. A large opportunity on the consumer side is resale — where companies like Beni are making resold clothing more cost competitive and accessible to consumers. These advancements set the groundwork for sustainability but don’t guarantee commercial success.
Consumer Centricity
There’s an assumption that sustainability is enough of a value proposition to win over consumers. But in my conversation with Sofia, she highlighted that:
“fashion is a consumer business and it is a business that rests on your ability to tell a story to a person about the person that they could be.”
For this story to be compelling, and to hook consumers, it has to be about someone the consumer actually wants to be — not the lofty ideal a brand hopes that they buy into. Practically speaking, when the average consumer chooses an outfit for an event, say a dinner party, they choose it because of how it makes them feel — cool, confident, creative. Their primary reason for choosing an outfit isn’t because they’re worried about the state of the planet — even if they might be.
You might be thinking, but wait, there are brands that include sustainability as core to their story. Take Patagonia — they’re a certified B-corp, they use primarily recycled materials, have programs that focus on lifetime use of their products, and have pledged their profits to climate change causes. But Patagonia’s strategy works so well because of who their consumer is. When Patagonia promotes sustainability and environmental causes, it aligns with who their consumers, typically people who spend a lot of time outdoors, are and want to be. This isn’t an easily replicable playbook. Using recycled materials or promoting clothing repair doesn’t guarantee the success that Patagonia has seen.
Hope isn’t lost for other brands — they just need a different approach. Companies need to earn the right to bring consumers on the journey of sustainable fashion by creating value for consumers first. The customer advantage they build gives them the permission to introduce sustainability initiatives to customers. In Sofia’s words, brands need to “be creative about overlapping sustainability and consumer value. That’s where you see some interesting headway. ” Sofia mentioned Girlfriend Collective as an example of this.
Girlfriend Collective made a splash with a pre-launch promotion that promised high-quality leggings for only the cost of shipping. They didn’t hide their sustainability focus, but they first delivered value to consumers — well-fitting, moisture-wicking, and opaque leggings. Along the way, they educated consumers on their sustainability practices — you can see evidence of this combination from their website during this time period.
Because of this approach of providing a consumer benefit outside of just sustainability, Girlfriend Collective has continued to be successful as a sustainability-focused brand.
The Way Forward: Building an Ecosystem
Introducing and executing on sustainability is hard for an individual brand. And in an industry as fragmented as the fashion industry, it’s even harder to make an industry-wide impact. For example, if a brand wants to improve its production practices, it may only make up 5% of a producer’s capacity — the producer isn’t incentivized to change their production processes just to satisfy one of their customers. Additionally, these changes are often capital intensive, so a VC investment model, which works well for digital supply chain transparency and resale start-ups, isn’t usually a good fit.
In talking with Sofia, the need for collective action stood out as a key challenge. Many initiatives that could chip away at this challenge — an industry consortium that incentivizes producers to shift capex spending, government intervention, philanthropic action — the list goes on. But these are just point solutions. Systemic problems require systemic solutions, and the established structures necessary to really solve this challenge don’t exist.
Curious, passionate, and focused innovators like Sofia are what the industry needs to keep moving forward. Getting an MBA has given Sofia the space to ask questions like:
“How is this industry changing? How is it growing? Where is the money flowing? Where is there a ton of innovation? Where are people not looking because it’s too thorny of a problem, and they don’t want to face it yet.”
She’s starting to uncover the answers to those questions. She has interned at a VC firm with a sustainability focus, explored insurance vehicles to promote carbon-friendly agriculture through case competitions, and has taken enough finance classes to put her on the path to a finance major (on top of her dual degree program!). If you care about sustainability in fashion, Sofia’s someone to watch.
