A Crash Course on The BoF Sustainability Index

The Business of Fashion Podcast

The Business of Fashion

Fashion & Beauty, Business, Arts

4.6 • 770 Ratings

🗓️ 2 April 2021

⏱️ 35 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

BoF’s London editor Sarah Kent and editor-in-chief Imran Amed delve into The BoF Sustainability Index, measuring fashion’s progress towards avoiding catastrophic climate change and achieving broader social imperatives by 2030.

Fashion’s negative impact on people and the planet is in focus like never before. Pressure to change is coming from investors, consumers, regulators and even inside big brands themselves. Companies are responding with high-profile commitments to do better. But are they actually making a difference?

In the latest episode of the BoF Podcast, London editor Sarah Kent and editor-in-chief Imran Amed discuss The BoF Sustainability Index, an in-depth analysis of how 15 of fashion’s largest companies measure up on sustainability.

The fashion industry has an important role to play in tackling global sustainability challenges, both because of its impact and its influence. “Fashion often flies under the radar,” explains Kent. “[But] it has power to really change people’s views and behaviours and drive a shift that other industries cannot so easily engage in.”
Overall, BoF’s analysis found that the big companies’ commitments are outpacing action. “Some [companies] are leading the pack and some are just getting started, but overall things are not changing fast enough.”
While the pandemic remains an immediate crisis for the industry, the climate crisis is increasingly in focus ahead of the UN Climate Change Conference due to take place in Glasgow later this year. “I think what is pretty well established now is the direction of travel that is needed,” says Kent. “What we need to start seeing is the strategies that are going to get us there. Where are the investments going to be made?”

Sustainability: What Brands Are Prioritising in 2021

The Waste Opportunity: How Fashion Could Turn Trash to Treasure

Fashion’s Long Road to Transparency

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Hi, this is Imran Ahmed, founder and CEO of the Business of Fashion.
0:14.1	Welcome to the BOF podcast. It's Friday, April 2nd. Last week, BOF was proud to release the BOF Sustainability Index, the culmination
0:23.3	of more than one year of research and analysis led by Sarah Kent, our resident expert on
0:28.8	sustainability and big business. For the past year, Sarah has been leading our efforts to structure
0:34.1	our thinking around how fashion can reduce its impact on the planet and improve
0:38.6	working conditions for its millions of workers. This week on the BOF podcast, Sarah breaks down the
0:44.0	thinking behind the index and shares the key findings in our report, the sustainability gap, how
0:50.1	fashion measures up. But if you haven't yet had a chance to download the more than 50 pages of analysis,
0:56.1	or if you want to understand how we put the index together,
0:59.3	this is an episode you won't want to miss.
1:02.0	First, I asked Sarah why the industry needed an index
1:05.3	like this in the first place.
1:07.7	I wanted something like this.
1:09.9	I write about sustainability for BOF and I'd get all of these
1:14.4	emails from companies telling me about this new sustainable initiative they were doing or committing
1:19.1	to some amazing new ambitious target. And I want to really understand, one, how did this compare
1:25.1	to what other companies in the industry are doing? And two, is it really
1:30.0	making a difference? And it was so hard to figure it out. Comparing one company to another was
1:36.9	almost impossible because they're all doing slightly different things or moving towards a similar
1:41.9	target, but talking about it in a slightly different way.
1:45.2	And then understanding whether they're really moving the needle on these ambitions that they're
1:49.6	setting was equally difficult to establish. So I wanted a tool to help me understand this better.
	...

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