How To Work In Supply Chain Sustainability & Transparency
With Megan Meiklejohn, interviewed by Stella Hertantyo
Conscious Career Chats Series
Fashion supply chains are global, complex, and infamously opaque. On the flip side, sustainable fashion is about reorienting our fashion system and the way we relate to the stories behind our clothes. This begins with advocating for greater transparency so that we know what areas within the supply chain can be transformed.
Greater transparency — understanding what a product is made of and where it comes from — doesn’t make a product sustainable, but it does create an enabling environment for a more equitable fashion system.
As the Fashion Revolution Transparency Index 2023 showed, there’s still a long way to go before fashion’s supply chains are truly transparent. This means there’s a lot of opportunity for careers in this space too. We chatted with supply chain and transparency expert, Megan Meiklejohn, to learn about what working in this field entails.
Megan is a sustainability practitioner with experience working in the fashion, green building, and manufacturing sectors. Since 2014, she has focused on supply chain transparency and the impacts of raw material sourcing within the fashion industry. Megan is currently the Senior Vice President of Supply Chain Innovation at Land to Market, which is the world’s first outcomes-based verified regenerative sourcing solution and product labeling program. Before this, Megan was the Sustainable Materials & Transparency Manager at EILEEN FISHER.
At EILEEN FISHER, she worked with the Savory Institute’s Argentinian hub, Ovis 21, to source wool fiber from the network for the brand’s largest merino wool program. Seeing first-hand how a brand’s support of regenerative land management could help drive ecosystem restoration and financial stability for the growers, Megan's focus turned to creating positive outcomes through the lens of business.
I interviewed Megan in the Conscious Fashion Collective Membership about how she pivoted into a career in fashion transparency, what her job entails day-to-day at Land to Market, how she is tackling fashion’s oversimplified and unreliable data, and how to embed sustainability beyond marketing departments.
Below are some of the highlights from the conversation. Inside our membership, you'll find the full recording with more insights from Megan (and get instant access to other expert Q&A recordings, workshops, and live events).
What led you to work at the intersection of fashion, supply chains, and transparency?
I've worked in sustainability my whole career. I have a degree in Environmental Resource Management.
When I started my career, I was working in the green building industry. That involved not only the construction of new buildings, but also working with building product manufacturers, as well as the maintenance and operations. I learned a lot doing this work, but I wanted to work a job that felt more tangible. For example I loved working with the building material manufacturers.
I’ve also always loved agriculture. I went to school at Penn State, and my program was in the College of Agriculture, so it was a part of my academic background. I also always loved fashion and textiles and was always curious about working in that space.
At the time that I was looking to get into fashion, around 2010, there weren’t that many companies talking about these issues in the fashion space. EILEEN FISHER had been on my radar, because they mostly used natural fibers and were talking about sustainability in a way that resonated with me.
I had been working with so many different material certifications and when EILEEN FISHER was looking for a supply chain transparency specialist, I knew I had to apply. It felt like luck, but I applied for the job and ended up getting it.
That role was amazing, because I was entering the world of fashion by looking at the sustainability of materials. With this supply chain piece built into the job, it empowered me to go and research and investigate how fashion works, how commodity markets work, how products are purchased, and how supply chains are architected. I was in the business of figuring out where clothing comes from. It was eye-opening.
My work at EILEEN FISHER involved looking at system design and figuring out where in the system we can have the biggest impact by making a change in the way we produce garments. Now I'm still focused on supply chain development, mostly around wool and leather. When I think about supply chain design, I’m trying to design with transparency and traceability from the start.
What skills do people need to best prepare themselves for working as a transparency or supply chain specialist in the fashion industry?
There are many different ways to get into this space. You have to have some sort of curiosity about how the world works. When you start to look at the economics — even the geopolitics — of some of this, it's really interesting.
Curiosity helps you understand that none of these issues are simple. Sometimes, in the sustainable fashion space, it feels like we get caught up in trying to oversimplify information to present it to consumers. For example, we reassure consumers by telling them a material is organic or recycled, but gloss over the nuances of what that means in practice.
In reality, supply chains are chaotic. This chaos isn’t always bad — it often adds to the resiliency of the supply chain. So it’s important not to oversimplify the way these systems work.
Curiosity also helps you to think critically, because there’s so much greenwashing in this space. Sometimes it isn’t even done with malice. Businesses want to talk about the good work that they are doing and there are a lot of businesses doing innovative work. But we still need to ask questions and be skeptical.
As you are trying to redesign a supply chain, you have to ask yourself: What am I hearing? Does it make sense? Especially as you start to collect more information on how things work, you start to see that there's so much nuance and complexity. And so whenever a simple solution is presented, you have to dive deep and dig into the information that's presented. That’s why I think being skeptical is essential in this type of work.
Secondly, being analytical is important, because once you start to dive into some of that information — especially the data — you never want to take it as fact. One topic I could get on my soapbox and talk about all day is how the data that's presented in fashion is so horrible. It's often incorrect and the methodology isn’t even appropriate for a natural ecosystem. This often has to do with the fact that we like to simplify too much.
You need to be able to look at numbers and figure out what they are trying to tell you. It’s never as simple as categorizing something as sustainable or not.
Finally, the most important skill is to know your product. If you want to work in sustainable fashion, and you're interested in supply chain transparency, that's great. But there's going to be a learning curve. You have to know the product. Understanding some basics about how fabrics are made, how different dye stages work, and supplier relationships is essential so that you can look into solutions and have intelligent conversations with collaborators and suppliers.
Another lucky thing that happened to me at EILEEN FISHER was that the first department I worked in was manufacturing. As I was new to fashion, it was such a blessing because I had the entire manufacturing and sourcing procurement team that I was working with who were able to bring me up to speed quickly.
Then I tried to pass that knowledge along too. If we had other sustainability roles that were filled, the first question I would ask is, “No judgment here, but do you know the difference between a knit and a woven fabric?” Often the answer was “no”. So, I’d take them through the basics of textiles. This base knowledge is useful, because then you can look at the data and discern what you’re looking at
Is it necessary to do a degree to develop these skills?
A lot of these skills are not skills that you can learn at university. But I do think that having some sort of technical background — whether it's in fashion, science, or economics — is helpful.
Fashion is such a global business at this point. When people ask me what I’m reading to learn about fashion or where I learn about the latest sustainability developments, it’s usually the Wall Street Journal or The Financial Times. You have to learn broadly about what’s going on in the world, because it impacts commodity markets so significantly.
Regardless of whether you have a specific degree or not, everyone is going to find their own way into this industry.
I've worked with colleagues from such diverse backgrounds, so I don’t want to pigeonhole people and make it sound like there’s a specific path to follow to get here.
You have to create your own path by connecting with others in your organization, proposing new ideas, and questioning the “why” of every sustainability initiative you set out to create.
What does your day-to-day work entail as a Senior Vice President of Supply Chain Innovation?
Land to Market is relatively new and still in its startup phase. As with my other colleagues, I wear a lot of hats that change from day to day. But ultimately, we work on a membership model.
We have food and fashion companies that are brand members of Land to Market — that’s who we serve. We serve them on three pillars, which we can simplify as supply, science, and story.
Essentially, we figure out how to get raw materials from regenerative farmers around the world into a supply chain in a viable way that allows brand members to use those raw materials for their final products. That’s my primary focus.
I also focus on science quite a bit, because as we start creating these supply chains, we need to know what their impact is. Brands want to know what they are supporting by purchasing those regenerative raw materials.
I’ve noticed that there are brands that are looking for an “easy button”. As an industry, we have gotten brands used to sourcing materials, getting a certificate, and calling it a day. It’s not that simple. This is why it’s important for people — corporations most of all — to understand what they're supporting, especially in this regenerative space.
These regenerative systems also create resiliency at a farm level. There are higher profits for farmers, greater biodiversity, and healthier soils. It’s not as simple as saying how much carbon they sequestered. Measuring carbon is hard and it’s only one indicator. We have to stop focusing on that and start to think about these other indicators of overall ecosystem health.
And that's possible when you're sourcing natural fibers, especially from animals, because the animals are a tool for regeneration. We hear a lot of negativity about leather, wool, and other animal fibers, but these animals are vital. They are an essential component of the ecosystem. When they're managed holistically, then you start to re-establish this relationship between that grazing animal and the grassland.
So my work is about moving people away from carbon tunnel vision and looking at more holistic indicators of impact.
Outside of brands, are there other types of places that people can look into working at if they want to get into the supply chains and transparency space?
Definitely. We need more people focused on this, but in a way where there’s more critical thinking. I have noticed that there's an unofficial playbook for sustainable fashion.
You get your certifications, you set science-based targets and commitments, you use tools with highly inaccurate information — such as the Higg Material Sustainability Index — and all you have done is create layers of administration.
We ask suppliers for a lot when it comes to filling out surveys and spending money on audits and certificates to prove that they’re not cheating the system. There’s a lot of time spent on administration, but still not enough impact.
Yet, there’s so much potential to create a positive impact in this space. At EILEEN FISHER, we always said that our work is “business as a movement” — I still firmly believe that. We need people in brands who are pushing the company, questioning the initiatives, and questioning the impact.
Outside of working at a brand, there are opportunities in the NGO space. This is a great option if you want to focus on a specific area of transparency and supply chains.
The nice part of working at a brand that’s mission-aligned is that you have many initiatives all in pursuit of one mission. You have to think strategically about how all of these initiatives fit together. Whereas, now that I’m at Land to Market, it’s a specialized focus on regenerative agriculture.
Then there’s the world of Environmental, Social and Governance (ESG) and sustainable investing. This space feels like the wild west right now, but there’s a lot of opportunity for people wanting to look into the financial side of supply chains and transparency. But this needs to be done in a more intelligent way that doesn’t just rely on existing frameworks that don’t represent what’s going on in the business. It would be great to have more people in this space who understand the fashion industry and know what questions to ask.
Regardless of your background, we need to see more knowledge crossover and collaboration to create a real impact. For example, if you went to school for fashion, we need that expertise and we need you to collaborate with your sustainability peers to merge your knowledge. That’s important.
Where should a brand start if they want to become more transparent without greenwashing? How can slow fashion business owners cultivate healthy supplier relationships? Is it possible to conduct reliable sustainability reports? How do we move forward on sustainability goals with such poor data in the textiles sector?
To hear from Megan on these topics and much more, watch the full recording in the Conscious Fashion Collective Membership!