How do we help fashion companies hit their climate targets?

A recent McKinsey report reveals that 60% of fashion companies will likely miss their 2030 climate targets.

Our mission is to assist companies with complex supply chains, such as those in the textile and fashion industry, to achieve their climate goals.
How? By developing an innovative solution that unleashes the power of data.

In this article, we dive deep into the vision behind our solutions and explain why we believe flipping the data access paradigm is the key to the industry’s data problem, where brands and suppliers face a lack of data access and standardization, and rely on outdated, delayed or fragmented data.

The Data Problem to Solve

The fashion supply chain is complex due to its network of diverse players and interconnected production processes.

Key stakeholders include raw material suppliers, textile and leather manufacturers, logistics providers, brands and retailers, distributors, and consumers, each playing a vital role in the product lifecycle.

The supply chain involves multiple phases, including design and development, material sourcing, production, logistics and transportation, retail and (after) sales.

While sustainability certifications were once considered sufficient to demonstrate a supplier's sustainability, the sudden shift to quantitative measurements has caught the industry off guard.

The fashion supply chain's composition of contractors and sub-contractors, which are mostly small and micro companies, often leads to a need for more skills and digitalization.

The lack of a digital infrastructure and standardized processes leads to fragmented, incomplete, or non-existent data.

As a consequence, many suppliers are unable to collect or provide the data required for transparency, traceability, and sustainability reporting, that brands and regulatory bodies increasingly are requiring.

To achieve data transparency in this complex landscape, the collection and standardisation of data from all stakeholders related to sourcing, production processes, and product movement is crucial.

In this fragmented scenario, Sustainable Brand Platform enhances accountability and facilitates real-time data sharing and collaboration between actors. However, before we can dive deeper into the matter, we need to understand the pitfalls of the current approach.

The Pitfalls of Current Data Practices

In the current approach, fashion brands engage with their supply chain partners through various systems, such as email, Excel, forms, and traceability platforms.

Involving different stakeholders, such as consultancy firms and internal sustainability or operations teams, all expect the data to be used for different internal purposes. Data is often requested without knowing exactly what is truly needed to achieve the internal goals.

This leads to: 

• Overwhelming suppliers with excessive requests
• Repeated, back-to-back data requests
• Unharmonized data requirements
• Multiple, redundant data collection for each brand
• Risks due to outdated data
• Potential loss or mismanagement of data
• Inconsistencies in data collection processes

Sending and receiving hundreds of questionnaires per season, which are manually filled and processed by both the brand and the manufacturer, leads to significant inefficiencies.

As a result, the conversion rate to receive the expected data from suppliers decreases, which could potentially disrupt the system.

We understood that this was not just a problem of automating the impact calculation for a single company, but rather building an ecosystem of data where each company represents a node of the network and needs to access data from many other nodes.

Transforming the Access to Supply Chain Data

The transition from a demand-driven to a supply-driven data flow represents a fundamental shift in the way companies use data to achieve their climate targets.

The currently common approach where brands request, collect, and manage external data can lead to additional costs, data inconsistencies, and friction.

Our solution changes this by enabling brands and manufacturers to own and use environmental data for internal purposes.

This data can support decarbonization efforts, provide commercial competitive advantage, and enhance product-related marketing claims and communications.

Instead of adhering to the siloed approach where each brand imposes its own data collection format and standard, we offer a centralized approach that harmonizes data and formats, reduces manual effort on all sides, increases response rates, and improves data quality.

We provide a data ecosystem in which Sustainable Brand Platform serves as a catalyst and facilitator for sharing and analyzing environmental data, transforming current data challenges into a cost-effective, scalable opportunity that benefits all stakeholders.

Brands optimize data access and operations by:

• Stop sharing requests across inconsistent data sources and templates
• Reducing data loss, data inconsistencies and outdated data
• Increasing response rates

Suppliers optimize data access and operations by:

• Sharing real-time processed data instead of raw data
• Using a standardized approach to share data across many brands instead of 1:1
• Engaging sub-supply chains to improve data penetration and quality

The Yamamay and Eurojersey case study 

A great example of how a data ecosystem, enabled by our platform, has benefited both a fashion brand and its suppliers is our client case study on the international underwear and swimwear retailer, Yamamay.

Yamamay, together with material supplier Eurojersey, has used our platform to exchange environmental data to measure the environmental impact of Yamamay products made with Eurojersey fabrics.

This seamless data exchange between Yamamay and Eurojersey improved the accuracy of the Product Environmental Footprint (PEF) calculation for Yamamay’s Sensitive® Sculpt Leggings by including the environmental emissions of Eurojersey’s Sensitive® fabric.

For a detailed look at what was achieved, read more here.

Enabling Fashion Companies Achieve Climate Targets

Thanks to our experience in industrial resource efficiency and sustainability consulting, we recognized the potential to automate environmental impact assessment calculations for brands and manufacturers.

Until now, data collection has primarily focused on facility-level data, leading to inaccuracies in data allocation which is usually volume-based and doesn't reflect actual transactions, typically material-based.

This leaves out an essential piece for an accurate assessment. We strongly believe that we needed to develop a truly disruptive and representative solution that accurately reflects how the industry operates, using a material-based allocation approach to enable fashion companies to effectively adopt Ecodesign.
More in the upcoming articles. 

Ready to hit your climate targets? Get in touch with us here!