The Fashion Producer Collective is a collection of producer-led projects representing a range of perspectives from individuals within apparel supply chains.

The Collective meets regularly in closed-door sessions to discuss specific challenges and offer insight and support. The following is a summary of the key points raised in a session on communication strategies between brands and manufacturers regarding decarbonisation efforts that took place in August 2022. The points below are based on the insights written by Fashion Producer Collective co-founder, Kim van der Weerd.

Key challenges:

Misalignment of priorities:

• Manufacturers often feel that brands set ambitious decarbonisation targets without fully understanding operational realities.

“There’s the perception that factories can solve whatever is thrown at them and that they can do it alone. It’s easy to have an idea and throw it at a factory. But that factory isn’t always in a position to do something about it.”

Lack of financial and technical support:

• Decarbonisation requires costly investments, yet many suppliers receive limited financial assistance or technical guidance.

Communication gaps:

• Conversations about decarbonisation are often one-sided, with manufacturers feeling their concerns and constraints are overlooked.

Unrealistic timelines:

• Brands frequently impose tight deadlines for emissions reductions, disregarding the time needed for suppliers to adopt new technologies.

Inconsistent standards:

• The lack of uniformity in sustainability requirements across brands creates confusion and inefficiencies for manufacturers.

Do:

1. Define self-interest broadly:

Decarbonisation goals must be about more than market differentiation – there is no such thing as a single sustainable business. It doesn’t matter if one company achieves its decarbonisation targets if the rest of the industry (and beyond) isn’t able to follow. This means acknowledging our co-dependence. As one manufacturer so poignantly remarked: 

“Competition loses its meaning in a situation where we all win or we all lose.”

2. Be vulnerable:

Acknowledge the ways in which you contribute to the problem. We cannot define self-interest broadly if we aren’t willing to admit the ways in which we contribute to collective outcomes that none of us want. Our point of departure must be that we all have a role to play, we are all implicated, we are all part of the problem, we all need to change.

“We (manufacturers) feel like we're being asked to move mountains alone, and, worse still, doing it for free while the rest of the world seems indifferent as to whether our businesses survive or not.”

3. Listen and empathise:

We cannot define self-interest broadly if we do not understand how our own business practices impact others. This means setting aside your day job, your own point of view, and spending time in someone else’s shoes. It means hearing what’s being said without making judgements about whether it’s good or bad, right or wrong. It means approaching someone whose lived experience does not fit within your own framework for understanding the world with curiosity.

4. Let go of the impulse to control:

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. And yet, so many of the tools in our sustainability toolbox are implicitly premised on leverage, on better controlling or policing how someone else behaves.

Don’t:

1. Prescribe solutions:

A conversation that starts with trying to get a manufacturer to do something pre-defined is not likely to create the conditions for open and honest conversation. This includes starting the conversation with a target.

2. Trivialise the gap between where the industry collectively is versus where it needs to be:

This includes but is not limited to referring to climate change as a data problem and focusing on targets.

3. Make assumptions:

Manufacturers are not always in a position to do something about climate change.

By addressing these challenges with thoughtful, practical solutions, brands can strengthen partnerships with manufacturers and drive meaningful progress toward a decarbonised fashion industry.