A Simple 5-Step Guide for Fashion Companies

Building a precise impact reduction plan is crucial for fashion brands and manufacturers aiming to minimize their environmental, social, or operational footprint.

While many still depend on secondary data for insights, transitioning to primary data collection can greatly improve the accuracy and effectiveness of these plans.

In this guide, we’ll explore how shifting to primary data collection can enhance impact reduction strategies and the key steps involved.

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Why Primary Data Matters

Primary data, collected directly from suppliers and other relevant sources, provides firsthand, specific, up-to-date information tailored to the unique challenges of your business.

By switching to pa primary data-driven approach, fashion companies can better identify issues, track progress, and implement targeted interventions that deliver measurable results.

💡 Learn more about the advantages of primary data.

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Step 1 – Prioritize

The first step in collecting primary data is prioritization. Start with secondary data to perform an initial company or product-level assessment, which will help you focus on the materials, processes, and suppliers most relevant to your brand.

The approach towards prioritization could be volume-based, for example, selecting a supplier from which you buy large volumes of materials or process impact-based. Start by selecting those suppliers performing the 2 or 3 most impactful processes.

Another prioritization option, the easiest one, is to collect data from the most engaged suppliers. While it’s a good choice in terms of minimizing the engagement effort, very often the most engaged suppliers are the manufacturers, which have the lowest impact across the supply chain.

💡 Explore how to conduct supply chain audits.

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Step 2 – Engage Suppliers

The next step is supplier engagement, often the most challenging. Many companies in the supply chain hesitate to share their data, whether due to lack of visibility, time constraints, or concerns about transparency.

While certifications may demonstrate good practices, claims must be verifiable to ensure transparency. To solve this issue there are two elements you can work on:

• One is systemic. Brands should harmonize their data collection request, at least when it comes to environmental data.
• The second is about tools & training. Excel or forms are the most used tools to collect data from suppliers. However, it takes ages to fill these files and most of the time they get easily lost in the darkness of folders stored somewhere in a laptop or in the cloud.

To address this, brands can harmonize their data requests and provide suppliers with user-friendly tools to streamline data input. Training is also crucial to overcome resistance to change.

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Step 3 – Collect Data

Once suppliers are engaged, data collection begins. Various factors affect the quality of the data, such as the processes used, the technology for energy generation, and wastewater treatment.

A practice that we see frequently adopted, is to focus only on easy-to-collect data like electricity and gas consumption. But this approach can overlook major impact areas like chemicals and wastewater. Areas in which, commercial databases have huge data gaps and inaccuracies.

It’s also essential to collect specific data for emission factors, like energy generation and wastewater testing, which are often missed,  if you are collecting data from a dye house or a finishing factory.

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Step 4 – Allocate Data

Once the collection is successfully achieved, the next step is the allocation. For a good allocation, you need to have visibility on info like production volumes and the process involved in the making of the specific material, to name a couple.

The more vertically integrated is the suppliers, meaning that they do multiple processes even within a single facility, the higher is the risk of coming up with data that can potentially be less accurate than properly modeled secondary data.

Availability and granularity of data can have a great impact on the ability to properly allocate data. If a vertically integrated textile factory is only able to provide company-level data, it will be almost impossible to differentiate the impact between a dyed cotton fabric and one that is bleached to be dyed as a garment.

More are more we see a variety of tools claiming to be collecting primary data. Too frequently, though, these tools have a superficial approach to collecting these data and only focus on providing forms to input the data leaving the burden of modelling them to the company itself

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Step 5 – Integrate Primary Data

The final step is integrating the primary data into your product and company-level impact measurements. Once your brand has the data, you will need to properly insert them in the impact assessment calculation- While not overly complex, it requires careful attention to detail to avoid calculation errors.

One step that we skipped, as it will require a dedicated discussion, is the verification of data. Lack of transparency across the supply chain makes brands fear that the data they receive is not trustworthy and needs to be verified.

As of today, this happens through on-site verification of bills and other documentation, often being performed during company audits (as it happens for example with the Higg FEM).

While it’s key to be able to verify the credibility of data, we think that when it comes to quantitative environmental data, technology can do most of the job if these tools are properly designed.

💡 Learn how technology is transforming the fashion industry.

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Ready to switch to primary data?

Primary data is crucial for accurate environmental impact assessments. With the right technology, you can plan and strategize more effectively using high-quality, up-to-date insights.

The shift toward data-driven sustainability is gaining momentum, and brands must adopt new approaches to data ownership and sharing.

At Sustainable Brand Platform, we’re committed to supporting brands and suppliers with tools that enable seamless access to sustainability data and facilitate efficient data exchange across the supply chain.

Suppliers gain control over their sustainability performance with access to detailed KPIs, while brands benefit from integrated solutions that combine product and company-level calculations with powerful data collection tools.

Whether you're a brand, supplier, or manufacturer, partnering with Sustainable Brand Platform is the simplest and most effective way to maximize your primary data insights.

Get in touch with us here 🤝

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