Producers, Not Consumers, Will Drive Transformation

Implicitly, our conversation is anchored in the assumption that consumers can drive change by, well, consuming differently. For example, if people were empowered to opt for lower impact products, then they might make better shopping choices. This would reward the companies truly doing the heavy sustainability lifting for their efforts, and this, in turn, would drive change.  

And it’s true: rewarding the manufacturing companies actually doing the heavy sustainability lifting would be a good thing. Though as I said last month, meaningfully giving consumers this choice requires labels that account for things like where and how the cotton was grown, where and how the yarn was spun, where and how that yarn was dyed and turned into a fabric, and where and how that fabric was cut, sewn, and turned into a garment. And, we have no hope of giving consumers this information if we don’t also rethink the breadth, depth, and complexity of fashion supply chains. Long and unwieldy supply chains are not an inevitability; they’re the result of brands choosing to offload financial risk onto their suppliers – because it’s better for their books and their shareholders. 

But even if consumers were empowered to make more meaningful purchasing choices, and even if this would be a good thing, it still won’t be transformative.  True transformation starts with producers – not consumers, or brands. Why? Because really doing something about our industry’s environmental impact requires reinventing how clothes are made. It also requires reinventing the contexts in which clothes are made.  I’m talking power grids, waste management infrastructure, and beyond. Most brands and most consumers do not have a deep understanding of the places in which clothes are made, nor do they understand exactly how those clothes are made. Producers are the only people with knowledge of both these things – this is why they are the only ones able to drive transformation.

Transformation Will Take More Than Market Differentiation

Although producers must be the ones to drive the industry’s environmental transformation, they also cannot do it alone.  I’m reminded of an anecdote in a book by Otto Scharmer. He describes a restaurant in Philadelphia whose owner, Judy Wicks, spent 25 years pioneering sustainable business practices. He quotes her as saying: “I realized that there is no such thing as one sustainable business, no matter how good the practices were within my company, no matter if I composted and recycled and bought from farmers and used renewable energy and so on ... I had to go outside of my own company and start working in cooperation with others, and particularly, with my competitors, to build a whole system based on those values.”  

As my friend Dr. Vidhura Ralapanwe recently reflected on LinkedIn: “Let me say this again; as a corporate sustainability practitioner who championed corporate climate goals, I support strong individual corporate action.  Yet by trying to outdo each other on climate action, we lose our ability to be effective in collective action. And we will collectively fail, too.”

But the truth is, as an industry, we have yet to nail inter supply chain collaboration – meaning collaboration between companies making and selling a single product – let alone collaboration across competitors. Last month I advocated for more equitably distributed financial risk on the basis that it would lead to shorter supply chains which, in turn, would enable us to communicate context-specific impact claims to consumers. This month, I want to advocate for more equitably distributed financial risk on the basis that it forces inter supply chain co-dependence. This means that if you succeed, I succeed too. And if you fail, I also fail. It means partnership, in the strictest sense of the word: shared profits and losses. More equitably distributed financial risk, and the co-dependence that would come with it, requires defining self-interest broadly, instead of narrowly.

Consumers as Conversation Changers 

As a former garment factory manager, I’ve been ruminating on how the public in the “global North” could have supported my former factory manager self with transforming our environmental impact and beyond. The suggestion I often hear is that instead of just shopping differently, consumers should also engage as citizens. But the thing is: many of the solutions put forward by activists make the former garment factory manager in me more than a little bit queasy.  Their solutions tend to feel divorced from my lived experience, and from the material and historical contexts in which I was operating. How can citizens, who, for the most part, neither know how to make clothes nor understand the contexts in which those clothes are made, ever hope to prescribe the right solution? So, I’d like to put forward a new role for people in the “global North”: not that of consumer, nor that of citizen, but that of ally and conversation-changer.  

I’m imagining a world in which consumers call out when binaries of good people versus bad people are used to explain the collective outcomes none of us want.  These binaries are implicit every time we frame sustainability as a matter of better controlling or policing how someone else behaves. Narratives of control are pervasive. Most of the time, we don’t even realize we’re using them. For example, supplier codes of conduct, transparency, compliance audits, and even the way decarbonization targets are deployed fit this bill.  These binary narratives of good versus bad people are also racist – more on that here.  

The truth is: we all do things that lead to outcomes that, collectively, none of us want. Most of the time, it’s not because we are bad people in need of more oversight and control to keep us on the straight and narrow. I’m not saying that all manufacturers (or brands) are created equal, or that companies shouldn’t be held accountable. But binary framing of our woes in terms of good and bad actors just isn’t a useful anchor for talking about systemic problems in which we are all implicated. 

I’m imagining a world in which people in the “global North” stand behind the idea that solutions will look different depending on product and place. If our point of departure is that manufacturers want to do something about their impact but for various reasons cannot, then we must put in the effort to understand why.  

This is more fundamental than just acknowledging that low prices or bad purchasing practices play a role in manufacturer choices.  I host monthly supplier meet-ups for the Asia Garment Hub. During last week’s session, I asked a small group of manufacturers to describe a conversation about decarbonization during which they felt recognized understood. Silence. It’s not a good sign if the people tasked with leading fashion’s charge against climate change struggle to think of conversations during which they felt their challenges were understood, and, even worse, if those same suppliers have fundamental reservations about the solutions brands and sometimes citizens in the “global North” are asking them to implement. 

The public must have empathy and understanding for the fact that manufacturers are being asked to rethink their entire business model and the contexts in which they operate – for free – while the rest of the world implicitly labels them the problem and seems indifferent as to whether their businesses even survive. 

I’m imagining a world in which people in the “global North” redefine the term “taking responsibility.” Taking responsibility – regardless of where in the supply chain we sit – should not be about how effectively we control others. Taking responsibility should mean considering how our own behavior impacts others.  For example, as a garment factory manager, the litmus test to which I held myself was basic: if our suppliers were ever discovered to be engaging in unethical behavior, could I look myself in the mirror and confidently assert that nothing we’d done had encouraged, motivated, or contributed to their decision to behave that way? 

Companies have their own financial books audited all the time. I don’t see any reason we can’t also audit companies against whether their management systems systematically take into consideration how their own business practices impact their suppliers and the world around them more generally. Hell, maybe this is the information we should be putting on consumer-facing product labels.