Sustainability in Fashion & Apparel: Creating a Greener Future

To make the world a better place, retail brands must do their part. Sustainability is where hope lies. We go beyond the buzzword, digging deep into what sustainability in fashion and apparel actually means for businesses and their customers. Feel motivated to create more sustainable practices in your business that drive progress for the planet, for people, and your bottom line.

We also show you how to communicate your sustainability. Attract conscious consumers and sharpen your competitive edge. Rich, detailed, and optimized product data is how. Learn why Pimberly – a world-class PIM platform – helps shine a light on your brand’s environmental and social impact, driving product discovery, demand, and sales.

This is a 20-minute read. Shut off all distractions, pour yourself a hot drink and get comfy. You’re about to become a sustainability hero.

What is PIM?

PIM – which stands for Product Information Management – describes the management of all product data, including your sustainability and traceability data (your net impact, carbon emissions, resources saved, etc.).

A PIM platform serves as a single access point where you can gather your product content from unlimited internal and external sources. Then you can manage and enrich your data, ready for publishing directly to your sales channels (such as your eCommerce store, product catalogues, marketplaces, or mobile apps). A PIM platform can also include Digital Asset Management (DAM), helping you centrally organize and optimize your images, videos, animations, and more.

What are the benefits of a PIM platform?

It helps you:

Remove manual uploading of data, driving productivity
Improve the quality of your data for better customer experiences
Align your different teams on product data for seamless collaboration
Create new shopping channels and expand into new markets
Create consistent customer experiences across multiple channels
Optimize your product content for SEO on different channels
Easily respond to seasonal changes and trends

With better customer experiences, increased product visibility and high performing teams, you’re business benefits from:

Better product discovery
Increased click-through rates
Lower bounce rates
Enhanced customer loyalty
Improved conversion rates

This equals more revenue for your business. Now that’s a dream situation, but we can take it to the next level. Imagine if all that increased revenue was the result of strong sustainable practices? Not only are you making more money but you’re helping people and the planet in this process. Keep reading – we’ll help you get to that sweet spot.

What does ‘sustainability’ really mean?

Think about sustainability and the first words that come to mind might be “green”, “eco-friendly”, and “energy-efficient”. All of these words have one thing in common: the environment. But the truth is sustainability is much broader than that.

Environmental activist, Adam Werbach, explains this in his book, Strategy for Sustainability: A Business Manifesto:

“Sustainability is much bigger because it takes into account every dimension of the business environment: social, economic, and cultural, as well as natural.”¹

For a business to be “truly sustainable”, all four areas must be addressed. In practice, this looks like:

Supporting human rights by tackling issues such as poverty, injustice, violence, and unequal opportunities
Transforming the business in a way that encourages economic equality
Protecting communities by valuing and celebrating cultural diversity
Supporting the environment by preserving natural resources, minimizing waste, and encouraging biodiversity

If every business decided to prioritize these four areas, so many lives would change for the better. It would help stabilize the planet’s climate, ensuring the most geographically vulnerable people are protected from the consequences of global warming. While improved working conditions, fairer wages, and equal opportunities would give people more freedom and security – two necessary ingredients for happiness.

Focusing on businesses in fashion and apparel, taking action has never been so important. Let’s explore why.

How important is sustainability in the fashion and apparel industry?

We’ll let the stats speak for themselves. Warning: it’s not pretty!

The fashion industry is responsible for 2.1 billion tonnes of CO2 emissions every year²and 10% of global carbon emissions.³ That’s because an estimated 92 million tonnes of textile waste is created per year globally.⁴ This waste is either dumped into landfills or burned. Both of these waste methods release toxic chemicals, like methane, into the atmosphere.

It gets worse. 20% of toxic wastewater comes from factories producing fast fashion.⁵ This water, which can contain mercury, lead, and arsenic, is often dumped into local rivers and is extremely harmful to aquatic life and the people living nearby. The wastewater can reach the sea too, polluting our oceans.

Plus, water is a raw resource that’s becoming increasingly scarce. The more water we waste, the harder it is to access safe drinking water, especially for people in rural, isolated areas. But the fashion industry gobbles up water like no tomorrow. To illustrate, it takes up to 10,000L of water to produce a single pair of jeans.⁶

The human cost of fast fashion is just as shocking. For instance, the International Labour Organisation estimates that 170 million people are engaged in child labour globally⁷, with many making textiles and garments to satisfy the demand of western consumers. While 68% of fast fashion brands don’t maintain gender equality at production facilities.⁸

Want some good news? As a key decision-maker in the fashion and apparel industry, you have the power to make positive change. And your business will be rewarded for it, as you’re about to learn.

The customer consensus on sustainability

The sustainability market is expected to grow from $6.35 billion to $8.25 billion in 2023 at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 6.8%.⁹

Rising conscious consumerism is driving this growth – 83% of consumers want to see brands acting sustainably.¹⁰

Many of these consumers aren’t price-sensitive – 66% of global consumers will pay more for ethically produced goods.¹¹

And a large portion of them are men – according to a recent consumer survey conducted in the UK on sustainable fashion purchase behavior, British men preferred shopping with sustainable fashion brands more than women did (53% vs. 47%, respectively).¹²

COVID-19 accelerated this shift towards conscious consumerism. It gave people time to reflect on their priorities and values. And with indoor activities off-limits, it also brought individuals closer to nature.

The stats agree: a 2020 Accenture global survey found that 60% of consumers were making more environmentally friendly, sustainable, or ethical purchases since the start of the pandemic. And in that percentage, 9 out of 10 people said they were likely to continue doing so.¹³

All these numbers prove that becoming truly sustainable is a smart business decision, helping you tap into a burgeoning market. But what does sustainability in fashion and apparel look like?

The five pillars of a sustainable ethos in fashion and apparel

From how you treat your employees to the way your products are made, sustainability should be weaved into the fabric of your entire business. Let industry best practice guide you. Here are five pillars of a sustainable business ethos in fashion and apparel:

1. A respectful and safe working environment

At a minimum, employees should feel supported, respected, and safe at work. That’s including people who make your products as well as those harvesting the materials your products are made from. A robust health and safety strategy is a huge part of this, which also includes mental health awareness and initiatives.

2. Responsible use of natural resources

Reducing CO2 emissions should be a core focus. You can do this by looking at the resources used when creating, testing, and transporting your products. This includes water, energy, and materials. Strive to reduce waste and water consumption, especially during your production processes, and switch to renewable energy where possible.

3. Sustainable materials

What materials are your products made from? Linen, GOTS certified organic cotton, recycled nylon, bamboo, modal, and hemp are examples of sustainable materials. But you’ve also got to consider how these materials are used in the manufacturing process – if your items are made using toxic chemicals or in unsafe working conditions, that can negate the good you do when choosing sustainable materials. You also need to think about the material’s durability – your customers need to be able to keep their items for as long as possible to reduce waste.

4. A circular system

Also known as a “circular economy”, it’s a model of production and consumption centred on sharing, reusing, repairing, and recycling existing products, rather than using raw materials to make new ones. We’ll talk about this in detail soon (it deserves its own section!).

5. Fairer wage systems

Your employees, including those working in your factories, should be on a living wage. It ensures that the individual’s basic needs are met through employment, including food, housing, and clothing. It’s different from the minimum wage (which varies between countries) as this is a legal requirement. A living wage is voluntary but encouraged – a sign that you’re an employer who cares about your people’s wellbeing.

Striving to make positive changes in all five of these areas can make you truly sustainable. If you only focused on choosing sustainable materials, for example, consumers might accuse you of “greenwashing”, a term coined by the environmentalist Jay Westerveld in 1986. Greenwashing describes the act of using misleading information to cover up unsustainable behavior.

Conscious customers are super savvy these days, and will likely see through any attempts at greenwashing. If you’re going down the sustainability route, you’ve got to be all in.

Moving towards a circular economy

What is a circular economy? It’s the opposite of the linear “take, make, dispose” model, driving overconsumption. Because a circular economy focuses on regenerative practices like:

Recycling
Reusability
Refurbishment
Remanufacturing
Sharing
Repairing

Poetic, isn’t it? And it’s the kind of poetry we love, translating into a BIG business opportunity: an estimated $500 billion value is lost every year due to clothing being barely worn and rarely recycled.¹⁴

There are plenty of successful clothing and apparel brands adopting circular economies. Like MUD Jeans.¹⁵

This Netherlands-based denim retailer often uses recycled cotton to produce its collections. It also uses high quality cotton certified by the Global Organic Textile Standard (GOTS) to drive durability. Moreover, it encourages customers to take good care of their jeans, keeping washing to a minimum. It also provides free repair services for one year post-purchase.

There’s more. When customers need a new pair of jeans, they can return them to MUD Jeans for recycling. The same goes for other branded jeans that are made from at least 92% cotton. Now that’s a circular economy done right!

This example should give you lots of ideas around making your clothing and apparel business more circular, including:

Making items out of waste materials
Making items out of recycled materials
Making the exact items required to order
A repair service or help for self-repairs
Washing guidelines to increase item durability
A product rental service
A recycling service for old clothes and items
Upcycling old items into new products

If you need a starting point, focus on reducing waste first as this will have the greatest impact on the environment.

What conscious consumers need to know

When checking out your brand, sustainable shoppers will be searching for positive signals around your products’ provenance and ethical credentials. They want to feel like they’re making a difference by supporting you over other brands.

It’s your responsibility to reassure them that they’re contributing to the solution – not the problem – by shopping with you. So your product information should be in-depth – pre and post-sale.

Remember, sustainability in fashion and apparel starts at the very beginning of the supply chain, from sourcing raw materials right through to delivering the finished goods. Full visibility around your supply chain is essential, giving customers a complete view of your processes, including the people involved.

Keep reading for an information checklist that’ll help you build trust with your target audience.

Info needed pre-sale:

Supplier and manufacturer information: provide background information on who they are and what their working environments are like. Also explain how much water and energy they use and whether or not they use renewable energy. Plus, if you have workers in other countries who make your items, you could give them a profile on your website. Or say who made the product in the product description.
A materials list: customers need a full breakdown of all the components used in your items to understand how sustainable they are – think zippers, fabric, dyes used, etc. Take a look at A.BCH’s material list for guidance.¹⁶
Material traceability: explain where your materials came from and who grew, harvested, and processed them. Lucy and Yak does this brilliantly on its cotton traceability page.¹⁷ Customers want assurance that you have excellent working conditions for your farmers and everyone else involved in sourcing your materials. Also, share how many miles your products have travelled as this contributes to the carbon footprint of each purchase.
Your packaging: highlight what makes your packaging sustainable. Perhaps you use biodegradable cardboard or reuse boxes. Also consider things like the tape, inks, and padding used in your packaging. Bonus points if you sell your products via brick-and-mortar and can do away with packaging all together!
How the orders are delivered: detail how your orders are transported and whether or not you have flexible, eco-friendly delivery methods. You could also include data like the mileage and fuel incurred with each delivery. If you’re aiming to be carbon neutral and your customers know this, communicate how you’re offsetting your transport emissions (or risk being accused of greenwashing).
Certifications: include any sustainability certifications you’ve acquired in your product descriptions, such as Fairtrade, GOTS certified, Global Recycle Standard, Oeko-Tex 100, and SA8000.
Overall stance on sustainability: tell your brand story, linking to your mission and vision for a more sustainable future. How is doing what you’re currently doing contributing to that vision?

Info needed post-sale:

Returns policy: detail your returns process and faulty goods policy. Also, encourage customers to use the original packaging to save materials. And tell them whether or not you’ll refund the standard shipping cost (if they have to pay) as well as how long it’ll take to get a full refund.
Garment care: explain how customers can care for their items to ensure they last as long as possible. This should include washing and drying guidelines. You could also include advice on how to make small, easy repairs to extend the item’s life. Or perhaps you offer a repair service in store where you can perform or demonstrate simple repairs. You might even have a “spares service” where customers can order things like buttons and zippers to replace lost or broken garment accessories rather than throwing away a faulty garment.
Disposal instructions: if your products can be recycled, clearly explain how by detailing where customers need to take them for recycling (bonus points if they can send the item back to you!). Or maybe, when a customer is finished with your product, they can sell it back to you rather than dispose of it. At the very minimum, give advice on where customers can donate their products to avoid the item ending up in a landfill.

Now you know what information you need to share with sustainable shoppers before and after a sale. Let’s look at how to easily communicate all that data, helping you ensure transparency to build trust and drive sales.

Communicating your sustainability with Pimberly

There’s a huge audience out there eager to hear about your business’ sustainability. But with so much complex data, how can you ensure customers get the right information at the right time without overwhelming your teams?

You need a powerful and efficient way of managing your data. This is where Pimberly reigns supreme – a souped-up PIM platform loved by some of the biggest retailers around the globe, including JD Sports, Monsoon Accessorize, Regatta, and Ellis Brigham Mountain Sports.

With infinite power, Pimberly can store, optimize, and enrich all the in-depth, granular details around your sustainable products and practices. And as a centralized hub offering full visibility, it drives the productivity of your teams, helping them work smarter and faster.

Learn exactly how Pimberly can help you boost the quality of your data, illuminating your business’ sustainability so you can:

Tap into a growing market
Sharpen your competitive edge
Increase demand for your products
Boost customer loyalty
Increase your revenue

All of which will drive your success, strengthening your environmental and social impact in the process.

Below we will cover:

Powerful data storage and management
Superior digital asset management
Maximized product visibility
A more sustainable way of working

Powerful data storage and management

All of your in-depth sustainability data in one place. Sounds dreamy, huh? Pimberly makes this a reality.

Rapidly import the data around your sustainable products and processes from multiple sources in any form. Then centrally manage this data like a boss, ensuring your products are matched with high-quality information.

Your customers gain the details they need to make informed and conscious buying decisions, driving sales. While each piece of data becomes a crucial chapter in your sustainability story, helping to strengthen your brand image through engaging content.

Supplier and manufacturer data

Pimberly can connect to supplier and manufacturer data feeds in minutes. Store this data, including your digital assets, against the companies you work with. Using Pimberly’s user-friendly dashboard, you gain a clear view of such data, helping you manage it more effectively to create rich backstories that highlight why you’re a sustainable brand.

Remember how sustainability starts at the supply chain? By detailing this information in your product descriptions, or in a separate web page for supplier and manufacturer profiles, you provide substantial evidence around your brand’s sustainability. Reassure customers that what they’re buying has been produced responsibly as you communicate your ethical and sustainable practices.

Clothing components

Savvy sustainability shoppers will go over your materials with a magnifying glass, figuratively speaking. No component will be left unturned. If you want to get a gold star for sustainability, detail everything that goes into your item, including fabrics, dyes, zippers, and buttons. In the process, you’ll gain customers’ trust, driving them to hit “Buy Now.”

Pimberly helps you easily populate and store this information against the right products. Save time as you manage your clothing information more efficiently. You also minimize inaccurate or missing data that could mislead customers and make you lose their trust (and custom!). What’s more, the PIM platform helps you quickly alter your product information – update your clothing components as soon as they change to keep customers informed.

Product care advice

Having helpful, easy-to-understand product care advice on your product pages is a central part of creating a circular economy within your business. It tells customers how to care for their items, ensuring they last for as long as possible. With this information visible, customers will know you’re doing your part to reduce waste and encourage reuse in the fashion industry.

Pimberly makes it easy to store this information against your products. With the right workflows set up, it can also send this content (as well as any other product content) to a proofreading app like Grammarly to determine its readability. Reader-friendly content is an important ranking factor for SEO. It’s also vital for a positive customer experience, especially when it comes to important instructions like product care.

Packaging information

If your products appear sustainable but your packaging doesn’t, alarm bells ring in customers’ heads. They may even accuse you of greenwashing, and nobody wants that! Reassure them you’re a brand they can trust with accurate data about the type of packaging you use. With Pimberly, ensure this data is stored effectively, helping you present it clearly and correctly.

Delivery and returns information

Pimberly helps you easily store your delivery and returns information – essential data to create a satisfying shopping experience. The platform also lets you alter delivery information when needed so you can respond to changes immediately.

Remember, conscious consumers want to see eco-friendly delivery methods. For example, they might want self-service options, such as picking up their package from a local storage unit. If you’re aiming for carbon neutrality, include details on how you’re offsetting your transport emissions.

Keywords around sustainability

Matching your sustainable products with relevant target and longtail keywords is essential for driving product discovery on search engines. Also, conscious consumers will be on the lookout for certain keywords, such as “eco-friendly”, “green”, “ethical”, “living wage”, and (of course) “sustainability” – signals that you’re the right brand for them.

Populate and store an unlimited amount of keywords in Pimberly against your products for different channels, keeping them organized and unlocking their SEO potential. Pimberly also ensures your keywords stay fresh and relevant. Learn more in our white paper: The Ultimate Guide to PIM for eCommerce SEO.¹⁸

Personalized product descriptions and categories

Personalize your product descriptions with the ability to store multiple versions. This gives your customers the choice to see as much or as little information as they want, tailoring the shopping experience to their individual preferences.

With Pimberly, you can also create a ‘sustainable’ product category, giving your customers the choice to browse exclusively environmentally-friendly clothing. This is especially useful if you need to accommodate multiple audiences – like the clothing retailer Monsoon – or if you’re in the process of phasing out non-sustainable clothing.

Superior digital asset management

Especially for clothing brands, pictures and videos are an inseparable part of your business. For one thing, they give customers an idea of how your clothes look on a person. Like what they see, and they’ll crave your products, driving them to hit that buy button.

Plus, images such as accreditation logos promoting your business’ fair labor, eco-friendly, and energy-efficient practices are instrumental in helping you build trust with sustainable shoppers. Conscious consumers may even have a list of accreditations to look out for, helping them spot a truly sustainable brand.

Digital assets are crucial for SEO too. Take videos. Search engines consider videos ‘premium content’, placing websites with optimized videos high in search engine results pages (SERPs). Images and videos also encourage customers to spend more time on your product page, which is an important ranking factor.

Keep reading to learn why Pimberly is the ultimate platform for making the most out of your digital assets.

Unlimited storage

You likely have thousands of digital assets, so the ability to store them in one place is critical. Otherwise, your teams will waste precious time searching for and sharing the right image.

Pimberly lets you store unlimited digital assets against one single product! With all your digital assets assigned to the right product, you’ll never lose track of a single image or video.

Remember, one of the most important digital assets for your sustainable business is accreditation logos. Store as many as you need on the page with Pimberly, signalling that you’re a brand sustainable shoppers can trust.

Rich digital content

As well as giving customers a realistic view of your collections, rich digital content helps you tell compelling stories. As a sustainable business, you should have an abundance of inspiring stories to tell, making your brand obsession-worthy.

For example, you could publish pictures and videos of the factories where your products are being made, demonstrating your ethics. Or perhaps your products are created using ancient techniques from incredible artisans – a video featuring an interview and shots of how they work would make customers go crazy for your products!

If you avoid embedding videos into your product pages because it’s too difficult or time-consuming, Pimberly will rock your world. It makes uploading quality videos incredibly easy, encouraging you to use digital assets to enrich your products.

Pimberly also helps your copywriters create better content using images and video. They’re able to see your digital assets in all their glory. This will inspire their content, resulting in compelling product descriptions that emphasize your values, attract conscious consumers, and drive sales.

Easy optimization

Making sure your digital assets are the right size is crucial – especially for mobile. Too big and it will impact your page load speeds – 47% of consumers expect a web page to load within two seconds or less, with 40% abandoning a website that takes more than three seconds to load.¹⁹

Pimberly helps to eliminate slow site speeds by automatically resizing your images and videos based on the requirements of your devices and individual sales channels. This improves the customer experience and your ranking – search engines will penalize your site if it takes too long to load.

What’s more, Pimberly automatically renames images according to different sales channel requirements. And the platform constantly refreshes your alt tag (an HTML attribute applied to image tags to deliver written context for search engines) so they’re always up to date, keeping your pages relevant for trending search terms – this is useful as new buzzwords around sustainability pop up all the time!

Maximized product visibility

Conscious consumers are more likely to shop on sustainable marketplaces. To get their attention and custom, your business needs to be visible on places like:

Accompany
Made Trade
Verishop
Fair Trade Winds
Two Layer Collective

These marketplaces have one thing in common: strong values around sustainability. That’s why they’re amazing at attracting your target market!

Easily set up sales channels on sustainable marketplaces with Pimberly. This means you can get your products in front of the right people at the right time, maximizing sales.

Pimberly also helps you tailor your product info to meet the unique requirements of each sales channel, thanks to the platform’s advanced scoping functionalities. Ensure your products look perfect no matter where they’re being shown.

A more sustainable way of working

Let’s also not forget the environmental cost of ineffective product data management.

Without a SaaS PIM and DAM platform like Pimberly, you’re likely managing your data from a mirage of systems and locations. For example, you might have dozens of spreadsheets in Microsoft Excel which consume significant storage and processing power every time you open, use and save them. Worse, hundreds of versions may exist in your database as you regularly share your spreadsheets via email (with the recipient saving every version in their email accounts).

When it comes to inefficient DAM, you could also have thousands of images and videos saved for each and every use case (i.e. your website, mobile app, eBay account, and Amazon account). Not to mention all those variations that have been sent for approval by email.

Emails in themselves can increase your carbon footprint when solely relied on for workflows and approvals. To illustrate, Eco2 Greetings estimated that an average year of emailing emits about 136 kilograms of CO2e, which is about the same impact as driving 200 miles in a gas-powered car.²⁰Even doing something as simple as CCing team members into you email takes up more energy, especially if you have digital assets attached that generate duplicates.

To reduce your carbon footprint, you need to operate as efficiently as possible. It’s essential to have fit-for-purpose tools and technologies, regardless of the volume of data you’re working with.

Deploying a powerful SaaS PIM/DAM like Pimberly totally streamlines the way you manage your product data. No more unnecessary emails, digital asset duplicates or power hungry spreadsheets. Your team gains a centralized hub to work from with shared dashboard visibility, simplifying collaboration. And all your product data is stored in one place, eliminating the need for sharing copies across different systems.

Pimberly also grows and scales with your business. This removes the need to constantly invest in new technologies and systems. You effectively manage growing volumes of product data in the most energy-efficient way, helping your business stay green and productive.

Make sustainability your superpower

Become a hero by fighting for sustainability in fashion and apparel. By using your power for good, you’ll make the world a greener, safer and happier place.

It makes you a hero in the eyes of your customers too. Existing brand advocates will love watching you transform into a sustainable business. While new customers will pledge their loyalty, captivated by your brand and all the good it represents.

Enjoy the process of becoming a sustainable business by taking it one step at a time. And use the innovative tools at your disposal to make each step painless. Tools like Pimberly.

Pimberly helps make sustainability a powerful business advantage. The PIM platform ensures your product pages are filled with inspiring, trustworthy content. It also enables a seamless transition to new, ethical marketplaces. All of which drives:

Heightened visibility and product discovery on search engines
Brand loyalty from customers with a higher lifetime value
Brand recommendations from loyal advocates
Cost reductions from streamlined business processes

With Pimberly powering your sustainability, you’ll future-proof your business and the planet!

Book your personalised demo today.

About Pimberly

At Pimberly, we believe all products should find the right home. That’s why we created the world’s most powerful PIM platform. To make your products stand out, fly off the shelves, and put a smile on your customers’ faces.

Since 2016, we’ve been helping global retailers, manufacturers and distributors streamline product data processes, create richer shopping experiences, drive demand, and boost sales through highly effective PIM.

We’ve collaborated with some of the most innovative eCommerce companies in the country. JD Sports, Monsoon Accessorize, Cotton Traders, Westcoast, and Arthouse are just a few names in our portfolio.

As time goes on, product information is only going to become more important and more detailed. As you scale and grow, having robust processes in place will be indispensable. That’s why we’re so excited to be at the forefront of a new data-rich age, providing best-in-class PIM for years to come.

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