How Can You Embed Sustainability Into a Fashion Brand? A Sustainability Consultant Shares Her Advice

with Selina Ho, interviewed by Elizabeth Joy

Selina Ho Sustainability Consultant — *Selina Ho, founder of Recloseted*

Selina Ho is the Founder & CEO of Recloseted, the first one-stop consultancy for sustainable fashion. Recloseted launches + scales sustainable fashion brands and helps existing brands become more conscious through their programs and consulting services.

Selina leverages her experience working at startups and Fortune 500s, and now leads an all-star team of consultants, sourcing experts, and material scientists to transform the harmful fashion industry.

I interviewed Selina in the Conscious Fashion Collective Membership to explore how to embed sustainability into a fashion brand. Below are some of the highlights from the conversation. Inside our membership you'll find the full recording with more insights from Selina (and get instant access to other expert Q&A recordings, workshops, and live events).

From your experience, what do you find sets apart the brands that have been most successful in their sustainability efforts?

This may not be an answer that everyone likes to hear, but I would say it definitely needs to come from the top. It needs to be a genuine interest from upper management and they need to actually want to walk the walk.

I've noticed with our clients that are the most successful, that they truly are in it for the right reasons and upper management gets it — and is willing to put resources into sustainability.

It's one thing to say, 'hey, we care about sustainability now'. But you need to dig a little bit deeper and ask, why is it? Is it just because legislation is coming down the pipeline?

It has to come from within and they have to understand that sustainability doesn't happen overnight. There are going to be problems. And at every turn, sustainability is going to be a more difficult and/or expensive choice.

If you don't have a genuine interest to actually do the work, you can find excuses at every turn.

How can individual contributors and employees advocate for sustainability within their organization, whether their company is sustainably minded or not?

Here are my four tips:

1. Show the value of sustainability. A lot of companies are profit driven. So you want to make a business case for sustainability and prove that it's actually good for the business in the long run as well. That will definitely get the attention of upper management.

You can do that by surveying or interviewing your existing customer base to see how much they care about sustainability — see if they're purchasing from other brands that are more conscious.

Show the data, the insights, and the numbers to back it up so that you peak their interest.

You can also talk about legislation, too. There's a lot coming down the pipeline in the European Union, for example.

2. Make it as easy as possible. If you make it difficult for them, it's probably not going to happen. I would recommend setting up a sustainability committee. It could be yourself and other people in the company that are passionate about this, and then you can work on this during lunch or maybe see if all of you can take a few hours off on Friday to work on it.

3. Set up a roadmap and a plan. Once you have that committee set up, think about the easy wins you can tackle. See if the CEO, upper management, or the executives care about these initiatives and plan accordingly.

I always recommend having some sort of champion within the company, too. It doesn't have to be someone that's at the top level, but someone that does have a lot of sway and credibility and influence so that they can amplify what you're doing as well.

4. Show results. Make the business case and showcase the proven results. At this point, you can start to bring in experts to take it to the next level.

With all that being said, though, I do know that people have full-time jobs, and this could be something they're volunteering with. So don't burn out — take it step by step. This will not happen overnight, so make sure you're setting boundaries.

And make sure you're advocating for the work you're doing. I've seen instances where people start in a design role, but they're really passionate about entering sustainability. So they start to do this work and they eventually move into a sustainability full-time role at the company.

So if that's something you want, then just keep that in the back of your mind and advocate for yourself, too.

A big barrier to implementing sustainability improvements is securing adequate funding. How can brands make sure they're allocating proper funding to their sustainability efforts? How can professionals get access to the proper funding to spearhead sustainability initiatives?

This is a really big topic that I'm passionate about!

Assuming that there's a genuine interest in sustainability efforts from the top, it's a combination of working with upper management to figure out what projects should be tackled first and then for every single project, making a business case out of it, so that you can show the return and get on the same page about the rate of return.

A big problem right now is that a lot of investors or even companies in general want to see a return in 3-5 years. But for a lot of these initiatives, it may take longer than that. So communicate that and share the intangible benefits you may have in the interim as well.

For example, the company can promote the work you're doing, the company can potentially hire better talent that cares about sustainability.

Then as you're implementing, try to get as much data as possible around the positive impacts that are happening from that and make an ROI argument at every single stage. So then when you go back and ask for funding again, you can say, 'Last time we did X, Y, and Z. It returned A, B, and C, and now we're ready to ask for more.'

If you don't have data and you don't have anything to show for it, and then you ask for more money right, it's probably not going to go over well.

Another question I get clients to ask any challenging executives is to also ask: 'what is the cost of not doing this?'

Yes, there's a cost potentially to change materials. There's potentially a cost to change manufacturers.

But what happens if it comes out that these materials are harmful to your consumers? What happens if it comes out that this manufacturer isn't paying a living wage — what's the cost of that? That's something to think about, too.

Once a company has the ambition and the financing lined up, how should brands go about setting up a sustainability plan?

The biggest challenge I've seen for a lot of our clients is data. This is across the board — even Fortune 500 brands struggle with this.

There are a few things to consider on this. One, having a central place where all the data is located, and everyone at the company is using that central location so everyone's not having their individual spreadsheets or databases.

Then it's important to agree on what's important to measure right now. Start to gather all that data and then see what's credible, what's not, what's inaccurate and what's the plan to get more accurate data. And then it's a prioritization exercise, in terms of what needs better data.

It's a big undertaking. It's not something that can be done in a week or a month. But you definitely need to get an accurate assessment of where the brand is.

Then it's a matter of creating a plan about how you improve and move forward based on the resources available, time, and budget.

Finding reputable data in the fashion industry can be difficult. How do you suggest brands balance not wanting to base their plans off of inaccurate data, but also not waiting until you have perfect data to take action?

As an industry as a whole, we need to set more precedent around what is good enough. I'm hoping that with legislation, there will be more processes and procedures, because it is a little bit like the wild rest right now.

Internally, it's a discussion around what does good enough look like for us? And to your point, you need to decide on a threshold, so that you can actually move forward and make some decisions.

For example, maybe you are sourcing cotton from a certain area, and you don't have data from there yet, but there's another area that has a similar climate that has data you could use.

It's about making processes and procedures and discussing what that threshold is and moving forward. Then, when you're communicating this in your sustainability report also pointing out 'we don't have access to this data right now, but we're trying to get it and this is the plan. Based on what we have right now, this is our best estimate or this is our best course of action.'

It is nuanced. It's not going to fit into a 5 second TikTok video. And that's okay — we need to talk about these things, and we need to have people understand that it is difficult to get this data.

So talk about it internally, figure out what that trust threshold is that makes you feel comfortable and and be ready to explain it.

How should brands measure their progress on their sustainability plan?

This is really important. I often find that brands will set ambitious targets for 2040 or 2050, there will be a big celebration, and they don't really talk about it again.

Then when they don't achieve their targets, it's brushed under the rug, and they pull it out to 2060. That drives me nuts!

So it's really important to set up the data, assess where you're at and then create a plan to move forward.

In that exercise with our clients, we try to take into account what's realistic. Of course we want to challenge our clients and push them. But also we want to base it on what's actually going to be doable, based on how many people are working on this project, how many hours they're going to dedicate to it, and how much money they have.

Then we set those targets. We make sure that we break it down into every single year. What's going to be done every single quarter? What's being done every single month, then every single week. So it's a very detailed action plan.

Then we always challenge our clients to look at it at the end of the week. Okay, have we done everything we need to do to meet this goal? Every month we talk about our progress, about the challenges, and pain points. We ask are we on track? Are we behind schedule?

And then on a quarterly basis, mention something to your audience. It doesn't have to be a full sustainability report each time, but maybe just a quick email newsletter sharing how you're doing on your projects.

It can show that you're keeping yourself accountable and your customers are keeping you accountable as well. Then, annually our clients will publish a sustainability report, where you can go way deeper and talk specifically about all the efforts you're making.

But a sustainability plan does need to be that rigorous. And it does need to be that planned out.

Because otherwise, you're just not going to get there.

That's not just with any sustainability target, but with any business goal really. If you don't break down how you're going to achieve it, you're not going to get there. It's the exact same concept with sustainability.