The report, shared exclusively with Sourcing Journal, dives into the progress the company has made on its emissions targets, its strategies for sourcing sustainable fibers, its resale and take back programs and more.
Katie O’Hare, vice president of sustainability for the company, said the progress it has made energizes the team to continue working on important initiatives like plastic reduction in packaging and supplier relationships.
J. Crew Group has set out to source 100 percent of its key fibers sustainably by 2025. In 2023, 56 percent of its key fibers—which include cotton, polyester, nylon, wool, leather and cashmere—came from sustainable sources, it said in the report.
In 2023, J. Crew sourced 61 percent of its cotton sustainably through several partnerships and programs, including its memberships to the Better Cotton Initiative and the U.S. Cotton Trust Protocol. Cotton makes up 68 percent of J. Crew’s overall fiber consumption, and in 2023, 1 percent of its cotton came from recycled sources.
“Cotton is our biggest material…so driving progress around cotton is our number one priority,” O’Hare said.
While the majority of its cotton is now sustainably sourced, the company’s sourcing practices for other materials—like polyester, nylon and wool in particular—lagged behind its 2025 goal. In 2023, 25 percent of its polyester came from sustainable sources, and the company could say the same about 24 percent of its nylon and wool.
The report represents only J. Crew’s 2023 progress, and O’Hare noted that the team has already made progress in 2024, with plans to continue that momentum in 2025.
“We are always looking for new recycled polyesters and nylons that we can use. You’ll see our eco swim line for J. Crew uses at least 60 percent recycled material in those product lines, which is a huge category for us, and one that’s really important,” she said. “Wool is a challenge for the industry, so we’re looking at responsible wool, recycled wool…and then also through our regenerative program, seeing if there’s new regenerative sources of wool that we can find.”
Despite the struggles it faces with some fibers, the company has made significant progress with others. According to the report, 99 percent of the leather used in Madewell products has been sourced from Leather Working Group-certified tanneries or from recycled leather.
J. Crew Group has worked to integrate resale and take back programs into both its namesake brand and Madewell over the past several years, which have started to see results as consumers learn more about the importance of keeping apparel items out of landfills, O’Hare said.
In 2023, Madewell Forever, the brand’s resale program with ThredUp, collected more than 428,000 denim pieces, bringing the total since its 2021 launch to 1.6 million garments.
For end-of-life garments, the company has partnered with Blue Jeans Go Green on a take back program since 2014. The program turns denim into new products for other industries—particularly insulation for housing and food packaging—and diverted 802 tons of waste from landfills, it said.
J. Crew also has a resale partnership with ThredUp for its program J. Crew Always, which encourages consumers to sell their pre-owned J. Crew pieces to others, rather than tossing them after they’ve finished using them. The report notes that, since the program’s launch, the company has recirculated more than 98,000 items.
“The resale market, I think, is becoming much more interesting to folks, especially the younger generations, and so we’re seeing great engagement on that,” O’Hare said.
And this year, the company announced it would take its progress one step further, adding a partnership for textile recycling, with the goal of fiber-to-fiber recycling, to the mix.
In February, J. Crew announced it had partnered with textile recycling company SuperCircle to take back consumers’ old swimwear pieces. O’Hare said the program has proven successful in 2024, with the average swim take back coming in at over five pieces.
“[That] shows a need. People had a lot of old swimwear in their drawers. They wanted something to do with it, and I think they were just kind of hanging on to it until they could figure out a responsible way to give it a new life, so they’ve been very engaged with the swim take back program so far,” she said.
The effects of the company’s new program with SuperCircle were not directly noted in the sustainability report, since its contents address J. Crew’s 2023 progress.
Like many other companies throughout the fashion and apparel industries, J. Crew has been seeking out ways to cut its plastic packaging consumption and has committed to source 100 percent of its packaging sustainably by 2025. That includes ensuring all packaging is free from virgin plastics.
According to the report, in 2023, 40 percent of its paper and plastic packaging contained 100 percent sustainable material, which it defines as “derived from certified renewable or recycled source materials, or designed for reuse or recyclability.”
O’Hare said packaging has remained high on J. Crew’s priority list for 2024, and noted two partnerships will help it decrease its plastic reliance even further. The company is actively partnering with Vela, which creates FSC-certified paper bags used for consumer-facing e-commerce fulfillment.
“We’re using this right now for J. Crew and Madewell jewelry and J. Crew Factory hair accessories—so starting small, and figuring out how we can continue to iterate and expand it across the business. We love this because [Vela bags are] curbside recyclable. The customers can just throw it in their recycling, [and] most people have access to paper recycling at home,” O’Hare said.
She also noted that J. Crew has been partnered with Sway, a company using seaweed to create plastic-free packaging, for several years, though most of that has been spent testing the packaging’s viability.
According to the report, J. Crew has decreased its Scope 1 and Scope 2 emissions by 55 percent compared with its 2019 baseline, with a target of cutting those emissions by 85 percent by 2030. In 2022, it accounted for a 23 percent reduction against that same baseline.
O’Hare said part of the reason for the forward progress comes from a new strategy J. Crew implemented in 2023.
“2023 was the first year that we invested in renewable energy credits, and so that was the big way that we were able to see that big jump in our greenhouse gas footprint reduction for Scope 2,” she explained.
The company has also been working to decrease its Scope 3 emissions by 30 percent by 2030, working off of a 2019 baseline. In 2023, it changed the way it calculates its Scope 3 footprint; it had previously been using the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s USEEIO modeling, but has since switched to Watershed’s Comprehensive Environmental Data archive, which it said “better reflects the global nature of supply chains and the complexity of goods and services production.”
In 2023, J. Crew had accomplished an 8.8 percent reduction in Scope 3 emissions from its 2019 baseline.
O’Hare said the company continues to work with its suppliers and partners to flatten its footprint. Last year, it enrolled several of its suppliers in the Apparel Impact Institute’s (Aii) Carbon Leadership Program, aimed at helping apparel companies’ supply chain partners streamline their carbon reduction processes and creating a standard for the rest of the industry. It has plans to nominate a second cohort of five to 10 suppliers in 2024.
She also noted the process of decreasing Scope 3 emissions continues to be a game of relationships for companies across the fashion and apparel industries.
“Scope 1 and Scope 2, we have control over—we run our stores, distribution centers and offices. I believe it’s important for brands to begin with goals around Scope 1 and 2, because it shows that we are addressing our own carbon footprint, so when we go out to our partners and ask them to be addressing theirs, we show that our asks are credible, and we’re on this journey with our partners,” O’Hare told Sourcing Journal. “I think the progress that we’ve made for Scope 1 and 2 is helping us have those conversations with our supply chain partners, with our material partners, so we can say, ‘How do we work on this together to collectively reduce our footprint?’”
While the vast majority of J. Crew’s Scope 3 emissions come from what it calls “purchased goods and services,” nearly 11 percent of its impact comes from upstream transportation and distribution. The company works with factory partners in places like Turkey, China, Sri Lanka, Vietnam, Indonesia, Cambodia, Guatemala and Mexico.
While some companies have started using nearshoring as a tactic to overcome supply chain interruptions and decrease the impact of their logistics-based Scope 3 emissions, that has not yet been the case at J. Crew. O’Hare said the sustainability team reports up to the sourcing team and works to identify the best way to operationalize the company’s ESG goals.
“I don’t think that the country allocation is being driven by our sustainability team; we really want the best product made in the best place, and so we’re working with our supply chain teams to figure out, at the factories that we’re in, whether they’re in the Eastern or Western Hemisphere, that they are sustainable, and then working with our logistics team to make sure that the transportation, whether it’s coming from a cargo ship from Asia or coming from rail or truck from this hemisphere, is as sustainable as it can be,” she said.
