7 Simple Steps to Start (or Boost!) Your Sustainability Efforts (Product Summit: Sustainability Recap)

We’ll be sharing the full videos of our Product Summit: Sustainability panels on the commonsku Blog over the next few weeks. Be sure to subscribe so you don’t miss a single post!

Sustainability is now a mainstream movement.

A recent consumer report by the National Retail Federation noted that nearly 8 in 10 respondents said that sustainability is important in their consumption habits, citing that over 70% would pay a premium, on average, for brands that are sustainable and environmentally responsible. This differs from years past where sustainability was a fringe subject, relegated to a small margin of consumers, but in 2020, sustainability reached a tipping point. 

The study separated buyers into two segments, value-driven consumers (where price + convenience were the primary drivers) and purpose-driven consumers, proving that we’ve reached a point in purchasing where purpose-driven consumption is on equal footing with value-driven consumption, noting: “Values are important as value.” 

Last week, we hosted our first-ever Product Summit: Sustainability, inviting distributor leaders and supplier leaders and their teams to join us for a concentrated 3-hour event that would elevate how we think about sustainability as an industry, as well as equip distributors with cutting-edge product ideas in the eco-space. The event kicked off with three in-depth panel discussions lead by leaders in eco promotions and the breakouts featured sustainable products presented by over 23 different suppliers. It was an epic learning experience with tons of takeaways, but if you didn’t make it, here is a round-up of highlights from our panel conversations, seven simple ways you can start (or improve!) a sustainability initiative with your organization. 

Thanks to the TwelveNYC team (Brandon Conovitz, COO; Sara Miltenberger, Sustainability Director; and Anna Lepry, Director of Marketing), Denise Taschereau with Fairware, John Borg with Eco Imprints, Emily Gigot with Sanmar, Michelle Sheldon with Eco Promotional Products, and Kathy Cheng with Redwood Classics Apparel for their insights shared through our interviews! 

#1 Simply: Start where you are

Net-zero. Carbon offsets. Blockchain. Circularity. Ethical sourcing. Sustainability is a broad and deep topic with many subtopics. Because it is so deep, we asked Sara Miltenberger, TwelveNYC’s Sustainability Director, how to even begin, and she had excellent advice for everyone, whether you and your company are a power team of two or a team of twenty! Sara encouraged everyone to simply start where you are: “You have people on your team who want to get involved and make an impact, most people want to do something but don’t know how to start. Start where you are, with the sustainable champions that you already have and also, with a simple goal that will help orient your team toward one key initiative” (more on that below). 

Beginning with your internal champs who are passionate about sustainability will help at least formulate a team inside your org who can begin to analyze your efforts, evaluate your supply chain, and inspire the company. Also, Sara advised that sustainability efforts are built upon data, and many of us already have data that we’re sitting on (for example, carbon offsetting initiatives that you can start with your shipping providers and suppliers). “You have data that no one’s capturing and that tells a story about where you are and where you can go … that starting point will help drive your goals and help show you that you are already making a difference, the data and the people already exist for you to start.”   

The only wrong answer to starting or improving your sustainable efforts is to wait: start now, start small, but just start.

#2 Simply: One reachable goal

Often when it comes to sustainability, we think too big, we think we must save the planet in one fell swoop. But sustainability is about taking many small steps in the same direction. Brandon Conovitz, TwelveNYC’s CCO, advised those who want to start to “find one area where you can have an almost immediate impact and then grow through it.” Brandon’s advice is ideal because focusing on a smaller goal helps you see your progress and, once you attain that goal, pick a new goal and keep moving. Sustainability is all about forward momentum! 

#3 Simply: Self-assess

One of the major initiatives that TwelveNYC created was their own Sustainability & Responsibility report, a report often created by manufacturers but rarely created by agencies. Kathy Cheng from Redwood Classics Apparel also shared their Made in Canada 10 Year Impact Report. These reports become a lodestar for the organization as it tracks the areas they could improve upon, citing their carbon footprint (as one initiative by TwelveNYC) as well as their social impact, employee engagement, diversity and inclusion, supply chain management, and more. 

It’s an ambitious undertaking but what the report for TwelveNYC did was establish a baseline from which to grow. Sara Miltenberger said that a report becomes “a living breathing document that takes you on a journey, it documents what we’ve been through in the past year and highlights every single department, how we’ve all poured our heart and souls into creating a culture at Twelve that values sustainability, diversity, equity, and inclusion while highlighting the work of our supply chain impact team.” When we asked Sara about the impact on clients with such a report, she replied, “Many of them either get inspired to create their own initiative or they want to know how they can partner better with us to help further the cause.”

Reporting on yourself and the key initiatives you undertake reveals just how committed you are to being a better company because transparency is key and you can’t fake authenticity. Kathy Cheng with Redwood Classics Apparel stressed this transparency, urging the industry to be more open about our supply chain and more open about our progress or even lack of progress. 

Self-assessing is being self-aware, a dictum not just for the individual, but for a business as well, and being self-aware is knowing where you are at and where you want to grow.

#4 Simply: Chat about it

Anna Lepry, Twelve’s Director of Marketing, helped unlock another step in the sustainability journey: start talking about it in your marketing. “Create short, digestible content that you can share in your newsletter or through social media that shares your progress or highlights your sustainable partnerships with manufacturers and their products.” 

Anna shared that in order to create a culture of sustainability, it has to be a thorough focus both outside toward customers that first must emanate from within. “As a company, our whole strategy around sustainability is being upheld in creative solutions through every department, whether it's our operations team talking to supply chain about an efficient pack-out on a project, or our sourcing and development team talking about what we can make that’s sustainable, or our design team trying to make a sustainable package feel more elevated, everyone has solutions they can contribute at the end of the day.” 

Chatting about it, internally and externally -and frequently!- is one way to keep sustainability top of mind.

#5 Simply: Listen

One potentially risky place to wade into is talking with your clients, particularly if you are not schooled in sustainable terms or an expert in ecology. It’s one thing for a client to approach us and ask about a sustainable product but it’s another thing entirely for us to shift that focus and approach our clients first. But this should never be a deterrent from having a conversation with clients.

In fact, on our panel of distributor pros (Denise Taschereau with Faireware, Michelle Sheldon with Eco Promotional Products, and John Borg with Eco Imprints) they discussed this very topic: How to engage clients with sustainable initiatives. Michelle encouraged everyone, “Don’t make it too hard. Do what you already do extremely well, ask a lot of questions, and simply find out what they care about, their values, their mission, and their stance on environmental and social issues.” Denise added, “A sustainability conversation is really a lot like what a healthy sales conversation looks like conventionally with your customer, just be curious, which is a main tenant of sales.” 

Rather than thinking you must master the world of sustainability and its myriad of terms and recent news, start with what your customer cares about most (a tip also offered by Josh Wolfe on a recent skucast, Simplifying Sustainability).

#6 Simply: apply leverage

No matter how big or small you are, you can make a significant impact because you have one incredible power at your fingertips and it’s what John Borg called, “the power of the purchase order.” 

Corporate spending power through your hands is a tool of leverage and simply shifting your spending with suppliers whose values align with your sustainability efforts can make a significant difference in exponential ways, but it takes intentional spending! As an example, Denise Taschereau shared that throughout Covid, their distributorship decided to focus even harder on their efforts to spend with more conscientious manufacturers, they grew from 3% of their purchasing going through certified B Corp suppliers to 22% of their spend driven toward B corp suppliers. And with impact suppliers (social enterprise makers, minority-owned, etc), their spending increased from 10% to 25%. Pivoting spend to more mindful initiatives by using the power of the purchase order is one of the most important (and easiest!) ways you can contribute to a globally conscious culture. 

Mindfully leverage your power!  

#7 Simply: Share

When it comes to leading your company toward organizational change and changing behavior systemically, one important way to advance your efforts is to continually share information. 

All of the leaders who spoke on our panels have a history of continuing education when it comes to sustainability because it’s an ever-changing category. To make it easier, Michelle Sheldon said to simply start with once-a-month videos you watch together as a team or simply talk about movies or inspirational articles you’ve read that are related to social impact or sustainable causes. Sharing what instructs and inspires you will help encourage more sharing.

Speaking of sharing, Denise shared that during the conference, her team would be sprinkled throughout the afternoon’s supplier sessions, making notes in the commonsku platform about suppliers and their sustainability initiatives so that they would have an easily retrievable database from which to pull and so that they could use this info to inspire clients as well. Making notes in your operating system so that these notes can be easily retrieved is crucial and it puts the part of product education on everyone’s shoulders, easing the load.

Emily Gigot and their team at Sanmar create some highly commendable work regarding sustainability education. Sanmar created an educational resource page, citing that “a t-shirt is more than just a shirt, it’s a ‘canvas for good’, which is where we can find the Sanmar corporate responsibility doc and more. Emily also pointed us toward developments in the textile industry at large and that we should follow, (specifically) SAC and The Higg Index. Denise contributed some of her best learning resources: Greenbiz, Sustainable Brands, and Promocares. 

From the supplier sessions that featured trending products in sustainability to every conversation, you have with a colleague, and every article you read that edifies you in your journey, the key to remember is to share. 

Remember: Everyone is on this journey and it’s much easier than you think. 

An empowering thought shared by virtually everyone leading a session or a breakout was this: Everyone is on this sustainability journey. You, your team, your suppliers, your clients, and your clients end recipients. Some are a little further than others, some are just getting started, but we’re all learning how to live, buy, and thrive more sustainably. 

There’s power in that, in knowing that as an industry, as a company, as an individual, the key is forward movement and making progress, one conversation, one resource, and one product at a time. 

Also, it’s liberating to know that we as an industry have this powerful muscle that we exercise every day, it’s called product research. You are constantly researching and sourcing new products, learning new imprinting processes, new methods of delivery, so take comfort in knowing that sustainability is an area where someone with the skills of a researcher, learner, and problem solver can master. 

Mostly, remember that we as an industry -collectively- wield a substantial power when it comes to sustainable initiatives, and when we balance (as Kathy shared), people, planet, and profit, and treat them as equal baseline values to build a business on, we’ll become more conscientious consumers and instead of always lagging behind consumer trends, we’ll actually lead our teams, our clients, and our industry forward. 

Thanks, again, to our many supplier friends for making such spectacular presentations and to our panel of experts for sharing your hearts.

We’ll be sharing the full videos of our Product Summit: Sustainability panels on the commonsku Blog over the next few weeks. Be sure to subscribe so you don’t miss a single post!