4 Fashion Sustainability Reports to Inspire How You Communicate Your Brand’s Impact
By Jharna Pariani
Explore how four consciously-minded brands have presented their sustainable efforts through captivating impact reports.
Every year, conscious fashion brands publish impact reports highlighting how far they’ve come on their sustainable promises. These reports aren’t just an effective tool in detailing responsible progress but they can also be used as an accountability scorecard to motivate companies to maintain forward momentum.
That being said, it should be noted that reporting must be undertaken with a great deal of commitment to transparency and authenticity.
In an HBR article titled Overselling Sustainability Reporting, Auden Schendler, author of the book Getting Green Done was quoted for quipping that, “Measurement and reporting have become ends to themselves, instead of a means to improve environmental or social outcomes. It’s as if a person committed to a diet and fanatically started counting calories, but continued to eat the same number of Twinkies and cheeseburgers.”
Brands need to be wary of how they present their sustainable outcomes and actively avoid greenwashing or even greenwishing their future goals. As legal ramifications over unfounded environmental claims increasingly grow, the need to carefully and accurately report your brand’s sustainable impact has become even more crucial.
The anatomy of a strong report includes harnessing quality data and depicting it in a digestible and structured manner using easy infographics, and explaining the methodology used, among several other factors.
Some can be as lengthy as 100+ pages, while others can be as succinct as 10 pages. We looked at established players and even the ones who are new on the scene to find you brands who’ve put in the work to showcase their conscious efforts in a uniquely captivating way.
Plus we noted the best takeaways from each to help you take what you need to serve as inspiration for creating and compiling a compelling report.