A long "lasting weight"

As a naive 16-year-old, I was sent by my supervisor at Bally to the storeroom to collect a long "lasting" weight. In the shoe making process, the last is the mould over which the upper is formed; the process of "lasting" is an integral part of the footwear assembly process. As an aside, the word comes from the old English word “laest”, meaning footprint. To the newly employed Colin a long-lasting weight made logical sense. After 20 minutes, I was informed by a chuckling store manager that I had "weighted" long enough!

I love factories. A few weeks ago, I had the opportunity to spend time with the Hanes team visiting their facilities in the Dominican Republic, and it reminded me of just how much I love the smell, the noise, the energy, and the sheer industry of a factory floor. It’s a privilege to connect with the workers, the supervisors, and the teams, witnessing the pride and commitment they exhibit as they physically create the products brands sell.

Throughout the latter half of my career, I've worked for various brands, and I'm consistently astonished at how little appreciation and understanding brands have for manufacturing. The factory base knows the product and our supply chains better than many brands do, and all of us can learn a huge amount from them.

Consider athletic shoes: they come in 12 sizes, consist of 52 individual components, and undergo approximately 365 operations to become a final product; and they have to contend with left and right feet !...(OK…forgive the creative licence, but you get my drift). All these operations choreographed by thousands of workers in far flung countries to deliver the products consumers demand. The number of operators in factories far exceeds the number of individuals in the brands, probably by a ratio of 10 to 1. And this is merely within the tier 1 factories, the facilities that produce the finished goods. Additionally, we have tier 2 and tier 3, 4, 5 suppliers providing the raw materials and inputs, plus all the service industries from canteen staff to accountants that support the process. Apparel, accessories, and other soft and hard lines are very similar. Our industry depends upon and is built upon the shoulders of these amazing suppliers, individuals, and factory workers.

This level of complexity is precisely what makes addressing sustainability such a daunting challenge. Most brands share suppliers and factories; very very few own any of their own manufacturing. No brand owns any tier 2 or tier 3 supplier at scale, which are the operations that principally account for over 70% of scope 3 emissions so getting brands and businesses to truly understand supply chain operations and drive action to reduce supply chain emissions is daunting. To draw an analogy, it's akin to asking a chef to manage how his ingredients are farmed. I'm NOT suggesting that brands are powerless, we MUST hold them accountable; just as we hold the chef accountable for the dishes he creates, however, the key to unlocking this puzzle is to work in partnership with our greatest resource and partners, the factories at all tiers across our global supply chains.

Recently, McKinsey addressed much of this in an article discussing the challenges businesses face in translating decarbonization commitments into action.

https://www.mckinsey.com/industries/retail/our-insights/sustainable-style-how-fashion-can-afford-and-accelerate-decarbonization?cid=eml-web

They proposed six key actions:

Create commercial value from your sustainability efforts.

Understand precisely what your consumers care about regarding sustainability to determine your distinct brand and value proposition.

Focus on the big two: Material transition and tier-two-supplier energy transition.

Extraction and transformation of raw materials into fibres and then into garments represents about 70 percent of the industry's emissions. To reduce emissions at material processing facilities, fashion brands need collaborate to drive energy efficiency improvements.

Build a carefully prioritized, robust roadmap.

A well-defined roadmap must address both the "what" and the "how" to expedite a fashion business's decarbonization strategy.

Get granular on data.

Access to reliable data is crucial for fashion businesses to progress through their decarbonization journeys, comply with sustainability regulations, and provide sustainability information to consumers. This is one of the reasons I joined the board of #Worldly

Enhance execution and transformation management.

To overcome execution challenges in a sustainability transformation, businesses could draw on the transformation playbook used for achieving higher margins or reducing costs.

Make collaborations action oriented.

The entire fashion ecosystem will need to collaborate if the industry's decarbonization goals are to become a reality. Brands with significant supplier overlaps, for example, could jointly define decarbonization pathways and create a critical mass to invest in supplier decarbonization initiatives.

My ask is that we don't overlook the factories and the millions of individuals that make the products our industry sells. Brands MUST play a leading role in executing against our collective sustainability journey, but our greatest resource is our factory base. They understand the mechanics of running this crazy business and by working together in partnership, we can solve this problem, and hopefully, I won't be left with a long "lasting weight."