Engaging Suppliers and Legislators Are Part of Everlane’s ESG Journey
Angela Velasquez
5 min read
Everlane is in the final stretch of the race toward its 2030 sustainability goals, leveraging public commitments to ensure accountability.
Guided by a three-pillar framework that aligns with the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals, the San Francisco-based brand is dedicated to its mission of “Keeping Earth Clean, Keeping Earth Cool, and Doing Right by People.”
At the SJ x Rivet Sustainability conference in Los Angeles last week, Katina Boutis, Everlane’s director of sustainability, shared how the lifestyle brand uses its climate mitigation targets as a larger umbrella goal to drive progress. Everlane has been measuring its climate change greenhouse gas inventory since 2019, and in 2021 committed to and were approved for a science-based target by the Science Based Targets initiative (SBTi).
“This was a really formal, publicly facing process that we thought was a really good idea to move forward with to hold ourselves accountable, but also to give ourselves a really clear line between what we do as a business and a brand, and how we can connect this to what scientists say we need to be committed to within this decade of change to enable some of these climate solutions to happen,” Boutis said.
Everlane’s commitments include a target to reduce Scope 3 emissions 55 percent by 2030 compared to a 2019 baseline. Scope 3 emissions make up 99 percent of the company’s total emissions inventory year over year. As of 2023, Everlane has reduced its emissions by 24 percent per product, which Boutis said is equivalent to a 38 percent reduction in scope one through three absolute emissions reductions overall.
“It’s pretty ambitious as a product brand,” she said about the goal. “As you can imagine, this is really being driven through our product strategy, through our design, and ultimately through our business.”
With all departments unified in pursuit of its targets, Everlane has aligned its business and design KPIs, objectives, and strategies. These deliberate actions include interventions within Everlane’s direct control, such as logistics decisions. “We work within our merchandising, planning and design departments to enable ocean freight across our raw materials and our finished goods and our raw material choices as well. We see those two as our biggest drivers within scope three. Within this sphere, we can make these decisions. We can do it ourselves,” Boutis said.
Conversely, there are interventions beyond Everlane’s direct control that require the company to influence and incentivize stakeholders across the value chain to foster ongoing change. “We’re really looking forward over the next five years to engage our value chain and our suppliers in a much deeper way because we are not going to be able to close that final gap of our Scope 3 target without engaging more closely with our suppliers,” she said.
Katina Boutis, Everlane’s director of sustainability.
Support system
Boutis pointed out that a substantial portion of Everlane’s Scope 3 emissions stems from the Scope 1 and Scope 2 emissions of its mill partners that produce fabrics, yarn, and final products. This year, the company began taking significant steps to address this gap. While Everlane may lack the leverage that some other brands possess—accounting for less than 10 percent of any given facility’s volume and lacking the financial resources for large capital improvement projects—its strong relationships set it apart.
The brand has linked with the Apparel Impact Institute and the Manufacturer Carbon Assessment Partnership to conduct feasibility studies and extensive ROI studies on what the facilities can do immediately and, in the future, to reduce their emissions. The studies will examine the cost and the return be it from a financial standpoint, or a climate and water standpoint.
“We’ve been working with our suppliers on ways of collecting and benchmarking their electricity use and energy mix. Any time there’s wet processing, there’s a huge carbon impact so we’ve been collecting information, doing benchmarking, really trying to understand where those hotspots are so that we can be prepared for conversations about how to partner on this,” Boutis said. “We’re really excited about this work…this is really where we’re going to be focusing over the next five years or so.”
Everlane is also lending its voice to help shape legislation, specifically SB 707, the California Responsible Textile Recovery Act. The bill, which Governor Gavin Newsom ratified on Monday, mandates that textile and apparel producers create and financially back a Producer Responsibility Organization (PRO) to ensure the reuse, repair and recycling of textile waste sold in the state.
With the help of the California Product Stewardship Council, Everlane provided insights to SB 707’s authors and sponsors to help tailor the bill for the textile and apparel industries. Boutis described the initial bill as a copycat of some other previously written, successful EPR bills for other industries. Though well-intentioned, she said lawmakers crafted legislation that would be difficult to comply with, or very costly to comply with, and put a lot of “wrenches in an otherwise more smoothly operating plan in general.”
“Textiles are just another ball game,” she said. “There were some opportunities for improvement on the bill, as we saw it, and we really thought that we could get involved in an early stage to be able to have those conversations with lawmakers.” The brand is also looking for ways to incentivize good behavior versus focusing on punitive measures where companies will be hit with fines or “named and shamed” for not complying.
The EPR scheme is in a place today that Boutis said Everlane feels more confident and comfortable working with. “We think it’s going to be able to drive a lot of meaningful change across the industry.”
