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Embedding sustainability into Vans, Supreme, The North Face and Timberland comes with “a long list” for VF Corporation’s new senior director of sustainability for EMEA David Quass.
Buzzy concepts such as regenerative agriculture, recycled materials and degrowth are all top of mind. More philosophically, he mulls what a brand should be today and thinks they need to look beyond their own operations, invest in alternative materials to bring them to scale faster, and collaborate with competitors to drive progress on sustainability. His main priority? Scope 3 greenhouse gas emissions, which he says account for 99 per cent of VF Corporation’s overall emissions, and are rarely talked about in an industry that likes to wash its hands of often unknown third-party suppliers. Within Scope 3, Quass says the majority of impact lies in raw material sourcing, processing and garment production.
The UN has warned that the world must halve greenhouse gas emissions by 2030 if it is to stay within the Paris Agreement’s 1.5°C pathway. The solutions already exist, it’s just a question of acting on them.
In its third quarter 2022 results, VF Corporation revealed a healthy business chasing sales growth. Its direct-to-consumer revenue increased 30 per cent year-on-year in the three months to January 2022, while digital revenues rose by 21 per cent, according to the company. Full-year revenues for 2022 are expected to reach $11.85 billion across its 12 brands, including a $600 million contribution from Supreme. Quass was brought on in February to bring VF Corporation’s sustainability agenda to fruition.
On paper, the goals for VF Corporation are to improve the lives of 2 million workers and their communities by 2030; to assess and resolve any pay gaps by 2024; to reduce Scope 1 and 2 greenhouse gas emissions by 55 per cent and Scope 3 by 30 per cent by 2030 (compared to 2017); to run all of its owned and operated facilities on renewable energy by 2025; and to eliminate single-use plastic packaging by 2025. Reaching that is realistic, Quass says, but only if the group can find the “key unlocks” in time.
In 2020, the group closed a €500 million green bond to support its key sustainability initiatives, one of which is to source 100 per cent of its top nine materials from regenerative, responsible, recycled or renewable sources by 2030. “Carbon is the top KPI we need to tackle, but we need to weave in other priorities as we go,” says Quass.
How the group structure affects sustainability
Quass’s outlook is not to make “going green” part of every brand in the VF portfolio’s identity, but for every brand to see sustainability as part of its function. While VF Corporation’s sustainability goals apply across the group, some brands are more vocal about their progress than others.
“The North Face and Timberland are spearheading our sustainability progress,” says Quass. “Those learnings can be applied to other brands, but it doesn’t always make sense for every brand to communicate about it. Vans is a skate brand. I don’t need a green Supreme brand, that’s not what Supreme is. I don’t need every brand to say they’re green, but I do need those brands to apply sustainability to the way they operate.”
Having worked for standalone brands before, Quass says the perks of groups are many: you can test different strategies simultaneously, apply learnings across brands, and lean on varied experiences with bigger budgets. There are limitations to the group structure, too. “Innovation is always difficult for established businesses because whatever we do will be incremental,” says Quass. “These are huge issues, but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t start.”
One area where the brands are learning from each other is circularity, with The North Face Renewed pilot and Timberland’s Timberloop take-back programme fuelling longer term strategies. For Quass, circularity is one way to decouple economic growth from more products. “By keeping products in play for longer, we can enter the reuse market and derive growth from there as well,” he explains. “As a society, we need to find alternative means for growth and re-establish how we measure growth. That is a longer term conversation that can become philosophical very quickly, but it will be critical. We are already seeing progress here with structures like B Corp which embed a triple bottom line of people, planet and profit.”
Overhauling the material base
The long list of challenges VF Corporation has to address starts with science-based targets, says Quass. While science-based targets provide a clear end goal, many of the “unlocks” that will get the industry to meet them are still unknown. VF Corporation is focusing on its material base, and says it will source its top nine materials from regenerative, responsible, recycled or renewable sources by 2030.
“Recycled synthetics help us move away from one bad thing (virgin, non-renewable, fossil fuel based resources), but they are not the end game. The energy that goes into recycling synthetics and the microplastics they release are not small issues, so you continue to look at responsibly sourced alternatives and regenerative agriculture as you transition off virgin synthetics.”
In some cases, VF Corporation has invested in alternative materials to signal market demand, helping them scale and improving their commercial viability in the process. “With scale, the green premium gets less,” explains Quass, noting partnerships with The Savory Institute (which also supports Kering on regenerative agriculture) and Terra Genesis International (which partners with Timberland, Vans and The North Face on regenerative rubber from Thailand).
One of the challenges is putting different steps into perspective without clear data. “What metrics and data do we have to prove that we’re moving in the right direction?” asks Quass. “Ideally, academics would research and pose potential futures, civil society organisations would innovate on those ideas, and then businesses would jump on them when they are mature and the course is clear. We don’t have time, so all of those things are happening in parallel. That means you have to constantly course-adjust to reflect the latest knowledge.”
Regenerative agriculture has been heralded as a silver bullet by many, but Quass says the reality is not so simple. “Regenerative agriculture is a new topic for all of us, and a leap of faith in many ways,” he explains. “We know it’s the right thing to do, but we don’t know exactly how much it will help us achieve our science-based targets, and it is a slow process. In theory, anything could be subject to regenerative agriculture — bio-synthetics, wood pulp, man-made materials – but if the whole industry switched to entirely natural materials, we would need to be mindful of land use and biodiversity.
Not every new innovation works for every company, he adds. Mycelium is great for some, but not suitable for hiking boots, which need to be durable and waterproof. There is potential in the idea of using captured carbon to disassemble shoes, but it isn’t commercially viable yet. “Often, you think something could be a game-changer, then you start testing and realise it’s not that straightforward or easily scalable,” says Quass. “That’s sobering, but any exploration gives birth to insight and data, and more informed conversations.”
For Quass, with a big agenda on his plate, he spares time to think about what a utopian future would be, one where sustainability leaders have the same level of conversations as those leading corporate investor calls. “We should be able to say which KPIs we exceeded or under-delivered on, what the root causes were, where we need to course-adjust, and how that affects our science-based targets,” he explains. “If we are able to talk about key topics in sustainability as tangible impacts, not just abstract principles that require a leap in the dark, that will be a utopian future.”
To get there, Quass says, leaps of faith are necessary. “We need to venture into chaos for the pain to become apparent, and for that pain to be resolved.”
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