.jpg)
In an era where business success is increasingly measured by impact alongside profit, sustainability has become a core pillar of strategic planning, especially for fashion and retail brands.
Far from being merely a regulatory obligation or cost center, sustainability in retail is emerging as a powerful driver of value creation and competitive differentiation. From supply chain transparency to circular product design, leading brands now recognize the intrinsic link between Environmental, Social and Governance (ESG) factors and their financial performance, operational resilience, and consumer trust.
A robust sustainability strategy not only protects your brand from regulatory and reputational risk, it also strengthens your connection with the modern, values-driven consumer. Today’s shoppers increasingly demand more from the brands they buy: clarity on sourcing, visibility into environmental impact, and a commitment to fair labor practices. Retailers that can meet these expectations stand to win long-term loyalty and cultural relevance.
What’s more, sustainable practices can lead to cost savings through improved resource efficiency and waste reduction, especially in areas like packaging, logistics, and inventory planning. They also open the door to product and business model innovation — from resale programs to durable materials — that directly address growing environmental and social challenges.
This guide will provide you with four actionable steps to build a successful sustainability strategy tailored to the unique demands of retail and fashion, integrating sustainability into your operations and paving the way toward a more resilient, future-fit business.
Winning sustainability strategy examples in retail
As an impact management technology built solely for the retail sector, Vaayu is proud to work with category-leading companies across multiple retail verticals, including fashion, footwear, beauty, consumer health, electronics and companies with circular business models, like recommerce, and more.
Over the years, we’ve been part of a brilliant selection of our partners’ sustainability strategies. Here are some of our recent favorites.
Triumph: Fit the Future
Triumph, a global intimate apparel brand with over 140 years of craftsmanship and heritage, launched its first Digital Product Passports and embedded impact data across the customer journey.
When it comes to such complex garments, tracking true environmental impact at scale isn’t just a challenge; it requires years of commitment. Together, we’ve powered product- and corporate-level impact calculations. With this next chapter, Triumph is setting a new benchmark for transparency in the intimate apparel industry, using this data to help power its Fit the Future strategy.
Axel Arigato: Our:Tomorrow
Together, we are on a journey to calculate the brand’s corporate carbon footprint and product LCAs across Scopes 1-3. Using Vaayu’s traceability features and advanced AI technology, we are integrating all LCA data across the supply chain and operations on a single platform and establishing a solid baseline for new reduction targets.
Through this partnership, the plan is for Axel Arigato to streamline its sustainability efforts with a comprehensive approach that covers the full scope of its operations.
Missoma: Leading transparency in jewelry
British jewelry brand Missoma is one of Vaayu’s longest-standing customers and has been committed to reducing its environmental impact step by step. MISSOMA is bringing sustainability to the table within a typically traditional and complex industry, leading by example in its mission to reduce its footprint.
Missoma wanted to address its deliveries and supply chain, knowing this was an area of highest impact. With Vaayu’s data, Missoma has been able to look more closely into suppliers at a granular level, identify hotspots within its logistics operations, implement reduction strategies to bring down carbon emissions and transparently communicate progress to customers, including launching the brand's first Digital Product Passports.
Step 1: Building and embedding a retail-ready sustainability strategy
Laying the groundwork for your sustainability strategy involves a few key elements that ensure you’re not only aligned internally but also prepared to take meaningful action, especially within the fast-moving and highly visible world of retail and fashion.
Embedding sustainability goals within your company DNA
Begin by anchoring your sustainability goals in your company’s business model and values.
For retailers, this means integrating sustainability into core pillars like product development, sourcing, logistics, product compliance, store operations and customer experience. This is easier said than done.
Integration within and across existing business functions is a fundamental challenge for new sustainability teams to navigate, which requires developing a deep, holistic understanding of the business, developing personal relationships across the company, and unrelenting persistence over time.
Aligning your strategy with what matters to your shoppers and internal stakeholders ensures buy-in across the business and authenticity at every touchpoint.
Securing executive buy-in for long-term sustainability
Gaining real traction within the business will only achieve long-term success if it has real support from key decision-makers, as existing business functions can be expected to resist changes that lack obvious or immediate financial rationale.
There is no simple formula to winning executive support, but there are several strategic reasons why corporate leadership should embed sustainability into their company’s fundamental business values and goals:
- Sustainable business performance is increasingly recognized as a long-term source of company value and stability – risk assessments routinely demonstrate with respect to climate in particular that net-zero aligned businesses stand better positioned to succeed long-term, while carbon-intensive or impact-vulnerable businesses face risk, both from an environmental and compliance perspective.
- Companies that track, report, and implement plans to reduce sustainability impacts over time receive more favorable analysis from financial ratings agencies, having a direct and tangible impact on a company’s access to financing.
- Making strong sustainability commitments and taking consistent and proactive action to achieve them can be powerful differentiators from competitors to consumers, shareholders, and other relevant stakeholders.
- Mandatory sustainability reporting, as well as performance requirements, are coming across the globe, from ISSB (GHG Protocol) corporate reporting mandates to product-specific disclosure and performance obligations like the EU’s Ecodesign for Sustainable Products Regulation (ESPR). There is a strong case to be made that it’s smarter to begin now and reap other rewards (above) than to wait and be dragged into compliance mandates in the future.
While the right narrative and evidence will vary by context, it remains a fundamental task of sustainability teams to drive this change, and they can do so by identifying the key internal drivers that enable you to convert your plans and commitments to actual implementation.
Drafting a strong business case for sustainability initiatives
To drive internal momentum, sustainability leaders must make the business case for sustainability, speaking the language of business: cost, growth, risk and opportunity.
Quantify both cost savings and commercial upside
The ROI of sustainability isn’t just about compliance or reducing environmental impacts. It can also be about revenue generation, customer retention and brand equity. Support your case with real-world outcomes, such as:
- Increased conversion rates on products with transparent impact data
- Lower return rates due to better product quality or durability
- Improved supplier efficiency through streamlined sustainability criteria
- Access to green financing or preferential procurement opportunities
Connect sustainability to risk mitigation
Retailers face mounting exposure to climate-related disruptions, supply chain instability and evolving regulations. A strong sustainability strategy is also a resilience strategy. Frame sustainability as a hedge against:
- Resource volatility (e.g., cotton prices impacted by climate)
- Regulatory penalties or restrictions (e.g., non-compliance with DPP or EPR laws)
- Brand risk from consumer backlash or activist scrutiny
Elevate stakeholder value — beyond shareholders
Today’s sustainability narrative goes beyond investor reports. Use your business case to highlight how your strategy creates value for:
- Customers (through transparency and product responsibility)
- Employees (via purpose-driven culture and inclusion)
- Partners and suppliers (through long-term collaboration and shared goals)
Ultimately, sustainability should be positioned not as a side project, but as a core enabler of long-term competitiveness, especially in an industry as culturally and environmentally influential as retail.
Step 2: Understanding your impact
Exploring key sustainability frameworks and methodologies
In the retail and fashion space, where brands communicate with a wide spectrum of stakeholders — from conscious consumers to global investors — it’s challenging to identify which frameworks and standards to follow, and how they complement or conflict with one another.
Many leading retailers use a blend of reporting tools to meet the expectations of different audiences, including many of these key standards and frameworks:
GHG Protocol Corporate Standard (GHGP):
- The GHG Protocol Corporate Standard is the definitive standard for quantifying corporate carbon footprints.
- The GHG Protocol is embedded within effectively all other significant legal mandates or third-party frameworks, from the CSRD and SB 253 to the ISSB and SBTi.
Global Reporting Initiative (GRI):
- The GRI is a longstanding framework that provides comprehensive guidance for reporting environmental, social, and economic impacts.
- It follows a unique perspective that considers impact materiality.
International Sustainability Standards Board IFRS Sustainability Standards (ISSB):
- These standards are now the leading third-party framework for reporting ESG information at the corporate level, currently including general disclosure requirements and climate-specific requirements.
- They’ve been adopted directly by many financial regulators worldwide as binding requirements for regulated businesses.
- ISSB references the GHG Protocol and now embeds SASB and TCFD frameworks.
Sustainability Accounting Standards Board (SASB):
- SASB is another significant voluntary framework of industry-specific standards geared towards the financial materiality of sustainability information, tailored across 77 industries.
- It supports investor and financial stakeholder communication and is now integrated with ISSB standards.
Task Force on Climate-related Financial Disclosures (TCFD):
- A foundational framework, the TCFD focuses on climate-related financial risks and opportunities in four core areas: governance, strategy, risk management, and metrics.
- It’s now integrated with ISSB's IFRS S2 Climate-related Disclosures Standard.
European Sustainability Reporting Standards (ESRS)
- The ESRS are a must-follow for many retailers operating in the EU, and are currently under revision as part of the EU Omnibus Package.
- These standards are shaping the future of corporate sustainability disclosure under the Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive (CSRD).
Science-Based Targets Initiative (SBTi):
- The SBTi is still the leading international framework for companies setting science-based reduction targets aligned to the Paris Agreement.
- Key standards are currently undergoing a revision process.
As referenced above, these frameworks are often complementary. For retail brands, the key is to choose an appropriate mix of frameworks that reflect your business priorities, meet compliance obligations, and speak credibly to both your customers and investors.
For example, US companies might opt for reporting against the ISSB standards and setting a science-based target with SBTi – this would, in effect, require a GHG Protocol-aligned footprint and set the company up for future compliance requirements (such as SB 253/261).
Quantifying your Environmental, Social and Governance (ESG) impact
Transforming your company into a sustainable business requires you to deeply understand and track your company's ESG impacts over time. Supported by the reporting standards and frameworks outlined above, companies can:
- Track key metrics: For example, impact categories such as carbon emissions, energy and water usage, waste, labor practices and human rights.
- Benchmark: Establish a baseline to set targets (such as SBTis) and track progress, identifying areas of significant positive or negative impact to prioritize efforts.
Conducting a retail-focused materiality assessment
A first step to assessing ESG impacts is to identify which specific categories are “material” to your business, whether in terms of the topic’s impact on the financial bottom line of the company (financial materiality) or the company’s impact on the environment (impact materiality). Materiality is a foundational requirement of all major frameworks, from the GRI and ISSB to the EU’s CSRD and underlying ESRS standards, although the focus of the materiality assessment does vary based on which standard is applied.
For your company’s first materiality assessment, we’d recommend working with a skilled consultant who can guide you through a materiality assessment geared towards the expectations of these frameworks in the retail context.
This process will involve taking stock of where you stand across a wide range of relevant categories, including:
- Environmental footprint: Energy use, material inputs, production emissions and waste across your product lifecycle.
- Social practices: Labor standards in your supply chain, DEI (diversity, equity, inclusion) practices and community engagement.
- Governance frameworks: Leadership accountability, ethical sourcing policies and data transparency.
Building an effective baseline
Once topics and impact areas are identified as material or not to the business (or environment), a stable and credible baseline must be established for all quantitative impacts the company wishes to measure. This is often a significant undertaking each year, one that requires the devotion of internal company resources towards data collection and the help of external partners able to deliver accurate and actionable calculations.
At the corporate level, a greenhouse gas footprint aligned to the GHG Protocol Corporate Standards is the fundamental first step with respect to climate impacts. Additional calculation standards abound for different environmental impacts, including circularity and water impacts.
One potentially useful lens in addition to these approaches is life cycle assessment (LCA), which is essential for comprehensively understanding the environmental impact across the product lifecycle, from raw materials to disposal. This is often critical and challenging for retailers, who lack direct control over the third-party suppliers of their product range.
Automated tools, such as those provided by Vaayu, harness LCA expertise to streamline tracking and impact measurement, making it easier for companies to manage sustainability metrics efficiently across their supply chain, enabling benefits such as more accurate calculations and, crucially, better understanding and management of these impact numbers.
Step 3: Best practices for collecting and managing sustainability data
The calculation process set forth above is only as good as the underlying company data on which it is based. So, once the applicable calculation standards and frameworks are selected and their fundamentals understood, substantial work should be devoted to internal data collection and developing a strategy for collecting data from the extended reaches of the company’s supply chain and diverse business units. You don’t have to be perfect from the jump, but it is important to develop and implement a strategy to improve data quality over time.
Build cross-functional ownership
Practice shows that leaving data collection and management to a single sustainability team is unlikely to succeed over the long term. Rather, a better strategy is to involve as many stakeholders as possible across product, logistics, finance and procurement to drive data collection within their own units. This creates shared responsibility and allows the sustainability to specialize in universally-applicable collection requirements and subsequent data cleanup.
Invest in fit-for-purpose tools for supply chain collection
Modern sustainability software is designed to handle the complexity of retail operations, including data collection from third-party supply chain partners that are otherwise disconnected from internal direct business operations.
Look for tools that can pull data from existing ERP or PLM systems and flag anomalies or data gaps automatically. This sort of automation won't remove the need for human oversight, but it will free your team to focus less on pure administrative work and more on analysis and reduction planning.
Leverage retail’s purpose-built LCA and supply chain solutions to streamline your strategy-setting and reduction process — automated, accurate and comprehensive.
Establish a feedback loop
One seemingly obvious but underutilized strategy to aid in data collection is to treat your internal partners as among your most critical stakeholders. This means not simply transforming the data they collect for you into a corporate sustainability report, but delivering unit-relevant metrics directly to the teams that collected them. This drives interest within the business and establishes an important feedback loop for identifying errors and reduction opportunities.
Step 4: Measuring progress through relevant KPIs
Developing a strong baseline of consistent, quantitative data is the foundation on which strong and effective sustainability strategies are built. Yet driving meaningful action requires careful, targeted analysis of that data over time. One strategy to accomplish this is to track a curated set of Key Performance Indicators (KPIs), each aiming to identify key directional changes in the sustainability topics that are material to the business.
Demystifying sustainability KPIs: Environmental, Social and Governance metrics
KPIs are crucial for tracking progress towards sustainability goals. In sustainability, KPIs help evaluate performance across environmental, social, and governance aspects:
- Environmental KPIs track quantitative environmental impacts and related metrics, from overall or per unit of revenue corporate carbon footprints to the percentage of products designed for recycling.
- Social KPIs track quantitative metrics relating to the human experience, from working conditions and wages to diversity and workplace safety.
- Governance KPIs can be used to track metrics relating to management and ethics, including board diversity, ESG-linked executive compensation and regulatory compliance.
Examples of common Environmental KPIs that you could use for your organization to both track impacts and the effect of reductions over time
.png)
1Vaayu’s work with Missoma, 2On’s intentions to further improve its LightSpray™ technology, 3Vaayu’s work with Otrium, 4Vinted’s Climate Change Impact Report 2021, 5Vaayu’s Circular Solution.
Establishing and reporting against a consistent set of KPIs over time allows you to demonstrate progress (or the need to course-correct) to both internal and external stakeholders.
Building an impact reduction roadmap
Measuring your quantitative ESG impacts is only the beginning — the next step is to define a credible pathway for impact reduction. This is best accomplished through a multi-impact lens, considering sustainability performance holistically.
That said, the climate crisis demands special attention, and a strong decarbonization approach is a foundational aspect of any sustainability strategy. Like for any company, decarbonization requires interventions within all emissions scopes. Though particularly for retail, special attention must be paid to Scope 3, where up to 98 percent of corporate emissions may be classified.
Key elements of a retail decarbonization plan include:
- Scope 1 and 2 interventions:
Transitioning company-owned facilities to renewable energy, electrifying owned or leased vehicle fleets, and improving energy efficiency in owned logistics and operations (often small at the scale of your full corporate footprint, but in your direct control and critical to implement).. - Scope 3 strategies:
Working closely with suppliers to decarbonize upstream manufacturing, improve material choices, and reduce transportation emissions. - Short- and long-term goals:
Use interim targets (e.g., 2030) to drive accountability toward your net-zero ambition, ideally with a credible third-party partner like SBTi. - Supplier engagement plans:
Offer toolkits, data-sharing frameworks, or co-investment models to support emission reductions within your supply chain.
Though there is also a place for offsets in driving additional emission reductions, the main focus of your efforts should be driving direct reductions within your own operations and supply chain partners. This won't be a one-size-fits-all approach, but a clear, measurable plan makes your sustainability strategy both actionable and credible.
Embedding equity in your sustainability strategy
A robust sustainability strategy should account not only for emissions but also for social equity. This means ensuring that the social impacts of sustainability, on workers, communities and vulnerable populations, are considered and addressed from the start.
For retail brands, this could include:
- Fair labor transitions: As you shift suppliers or materials, ensure workers are not displaced without support. Build in supplier partnerships that prioritize wages, safety, and job quality.
- Inclusive decision-making: Involve impacted communities — from garment workers to waste handlers — in shaping solutions, for instance through a reporting mechanism to hear concerns.
- Localized climate risk mapping: Understand which parts of your value chain are most exposed to environmental or economic instability and plan mitigation strategies accordingly.
- Equity-focused KPIs: Track indicators such as wage fairness, gender equity, and community investment alongside traditional environmental metrics.
Embedding equity builds resilience, strengthens brand trust and aligns your sustainability efforts with a more inclusive and future-fit retail economy.
Step 5: Collaborating beyond your company for industry-wide action
Retailers can’t solve the climate crisis alone. Many of the most effective sustainability strategies emerge through sector collaboration, shared infrastructure and collective standards.
Moving from isolated action to industry-wide alignment is key to scaling impact. Retail brands can amplify their efforts by:
- Joining coalitions focused on shared sustainability goals, such as material innovation, textile recycling, or supplier traceability.
- Engaging in formal and informal policy dialogues that shape the regulatory landscape, ensuring that industry expertise informs realistic and effective legislation.
- Contributing to open data or impact platforms that accelerate transparency and standardization across the value chain.
Sustainability teams are also often smaller units within companies, meaning that without external collaboration, they are left to understand expectations, reporting standards, and best practices in isolation. This is not only inefficient, but it often results in new knowledge and strategies being overlooked. So it’s essentially to build external relationships and treat other sustainability professionals across the sector and profession as a key resource and network of expertise to rely on.
Collaboration builds momentum and helps shift sustainability from an expectation to better implementation, raising the floor for everyone while preserving your brand’s leadership edge.
Putting it together: Embedding sustainability for long-term success and competitive advantage
A winning sustainability strategy is not a one-off project — it’s a fundamental shift in how your company defines value, measures performance and plans for the future. It requires more than a checklist of actions, demanding a transformation in mindset where sustainability becomes a shared responsibility across departments, roles, leadership levels and even consumers.
Retail brands and businesses that rise to this challenge aren’t just reacting to consumer or regulatory pressure; they’re embracing a new model of business built on transparency, resilience and purpose. These companies are turning ESG from a reporting obligation into a driver of operational excellence and cultural relevance.
Success lies in embedding sustainability into the rhythm of decision-making, from how products are designed and sourced, to how data is captured and shared, to how performance is tracked and improved over time. It’s a dynamic process, not just a destination, that thrives on iteration, innovation and cross-functional alignment.
As the retail landscape continues to evolve in the face of climate, social, and economic disruption, sustainability will no longer be a differentiator; it will be a foundation for better business performance.
Those who act now will not only meet the moment but can actively shape the future of the industry!
If your company is ready to hone its sustainability strategy to power measurable impact, reach out to one of Vaayu’s experts today. Our team has a combined deep expertise in providing tailored guidance on building or refining your sustainability strategy within the retail industry.
.png)
.png)
.png){kind=icon}