A record 200.4 million consumers shopped over the five-day holiday weekend (from Thanksgiving Day and Black Friday through to Cyber Monday) in the US, surpassing 2022’s record of 196.7 million, according to the National Retail Federation’s annual survey.

Some 36% of surveyed consumers said they shopped at clothing and accessories stores, while 49% of all gifts bought were clothing and accessories.

Number of mentions of 'Black Friday' 2023 on social media among tracked industry influencers

Unsurprisingly, GlobalData social media analytics recorded a spike in posts about 'Black Friday' among industry influencers.

However, the holiday was a mixed bag for apparel companies.

Notable online winners included gymwear fashion brand Gymshark, whose Month-over-Month (MoM) traffic rose 83% in November, according to SimilarWeb’s analytics. The company also achieved Year-over-Year (YoY) traffic growth of 12% for the discount holiday of the year.

Other online winners included Inditex’s Zara whose MoM online traffic increased by 13%, while its YoY traffic for Black Friday surged by 32%.

Pretty Little Thing appeared to take a lower profile in this year's Black Friday. Its traffic actually decreased by 2.6% MoM, while YoY traffic for Black Friday decreased by almost half (45%).

Online fast fashion retailer Shein, which has recently filed paperwork to float on the US stock market, also recorded a 9.5% decrease in MoM traffic and a 22% decrease in YoY traffic for Black Friday.

Bloomberg has suggested the brands most reliant on Black Friday suffered the most, with Columbia Sportswear, Levi Strauss & Co and Capri Holdings, recording negative YoY growth for Black Friday sales. The annual retail extravaganza accounts for 3%, 2% and 2.8% of these companies’ observed year-to-date sales, respectively.

By contrast, discount apparel retailer TJX Companies, for whom Black Friday accounts for just 0.7% of year-to-date sales, witnessed 8.8% growth in YoY Black Friday sales.

Nike, for whom Black Friday accounts for just 1.6% of year-to-date sales, also fared very well, seeing a 31.6% growth in YoY Black Friday sales.

Our signals coverage is powered by GlobalData’s Thematic Engine, which tags millions of data items across six alternative datasets — patents, jobs, deals, company filings, social media mentions and news — to themes, sectors and companies. These signals enhance our predictive capabilities, helping us to identify the most disruptive threats across each of the sectors we cover and the companies best placed to succeed. 

US online thrift store ThredUp reported a quarterly revenue of $82m for its third quarter 2023, representing an increase of 21% year over year. The resale platform also achieved quarterly adjusted EBITDA breakeven and free cash flow for the first time in its history.

ThredUp benefits from resale market boom

Gross profits increased by 27% year over year, totalling $56.6m. ThredUp’s chief financial officer Sean Sobers characterised this growth metric as the “best indicator” of the company’s underlying growth in light of changes in revenue accounting.

Gross margin also increased from 65.5% in Q3 2022 to 69% in Q3 2023. US gross margins stood at 78.5% – which was attributed to the company’s shift from a resale-as-a-service (RaaS) business model to consignment in the US.

ThredUp said that it also plans to transition its European business from RaaS to consignment-based, giving it more “levers” to manage gross margins.

The resale platform’s active buyers and total orders have also been growing: 1.8 million orders were placed in Q3 2023 compared to 1.79 million orders in Q2 and 1.51m orders in Q1.

The company says that it achieved this growth with a 4% increase in expenses across operations, product and technology. It has expanded its artificial intelligence deployment across its distribution centre network and product experience.

ThredUp’s performance also echoes a wider boom in the global resale market, as other resalers such as Vinted and Depop report growing revenues.

Vinted recently announced strong revenue growth of 51% in 2022, bringing in €370.2m ($401.7m) compared to 2021’s €245.1m. Depop’s recently filed accounts for 2022 also revealed that revenue rose 8% year-over-year to £54.3m, while losses narrowed from £84.5m in 2021 to £59.4m.

Gen Z - driving the shift to pre-loved

Thomas S. Robertson, professor of marketing at the Wharton School and an expert in retail strategy, wrote in the Harvard Business Review that historically, brands were apprehensive that consumers might “trade down”, opting for pre-owned rather than new goods.

“What should really worry companies is this: If they don’t sell their own used products, someone else will,” he added.

The biggest driver of this shift to resale? Gen Z. This demographic group, he believes, are “trailblazers” and are “powerfully motivated by the idea of sustainability”.

“In many respects, they are the ones who have fuelled the explosive growth of the resale market, in part by rejecting the long-standing stigma associated with buying second-hand items,” Robertson said. “Clothing is a powerful and visible means of displaying status, and what we’re now seeing among Gen Zs is a kind of reverse conspicuous consumption, in which they convey status by showing themselves to be 'good thrifters'.”

Our signals coverage is powered by GlobalData’s Thematic Engine, which tags millions of data items across six alternative datasets — patents, jobs, deals, company filings, social media mentions and news — to themes, sectors and companies. These signals enhance our predictive capabilities, helping us to identify the most disruptive threats across each of the sectors we cover and the companies best placed to succeed. 

Renewcell, a Swedish textile-to-textile recycling company, published its interim Q3 financial results on Tuesday (7 November), revealing a slower-than-expected demand for recycled textiles among fashion brands.

The company, which produces a trademarked dissolving pulp made from 100% textile waste called Circulose, generated a net loss of SEK94.5m ($8.68m) between July and September 2023 – somewhat far from its hope of reaching break-even on a cash flow basis by the end of the year.

Over the past year, the company has been ramping up production significantly, from 3,388 tonnes in Q1 to 7,554 tonnes in Q3.

Magnus Håkansson, Renewcell’s acting CEO, said that, while the company has the capacity to produce sufficient volumes (4000 tonnes per month) to break even, “the demand in terms of hard orders from the brands is coming along with less urgency than we had expected”.

Brands have been buying smaller volumes of fibre from the company’s pilot production plant in Kristinehamn, resulting in 250 successful launches of capsule collections with brands such as H&M, Inditex and Levi Strauss.

After setting an aim to have 40% fibres in 2030 from circular sources, Zara-owner Inditex recently placed an initial order of 2,000 tonnes of fibre from one of Renewcell’s fibre-producing customers, and have plans to further integrate this fully-recycled pulp into their fabrics via their network of suppliers.

Renewcell’s interim Q3 report also mentions an off-take agreement with H&M which Håkansson characterises as “a solid sign of commitment”, alongside another order of 1,000 tonnes of pulp from one of the other leading fibre producers.

However, the company wants to see a transition from development projects to orders for main collections on a larger scale, leading to commercial-scale production at its Ortviken plant.

“The real demand has to come from the big brands and for the big brands to take leadership in buying sufficient volumes for this to become sustainable,” Håkansson said in the company’s Q3 results livestream.

On a defiant note of optimism, the interim report said that “[t]here is no doubt the world is transitioning towards green circular product flows and Renewcell is uniquely positioned to contribute to this transition”.

Why is there weak demand for Renewcell's Circulose among fashion brands?

In the Q3 results livestream, Håkansson spoke of the textile industry’s complex supply chains with its various, often backward-looking, actors.

He said that “the real demand has to come from the big brands”, but Renewcell can work to have “deep discussions about value proposition [and] about product quality”, expanding the conversation beyond the “sustainability officers at the top of brands’ hierarchies” to every part of the value chain. He spoke of educating sales people and purchasing organisations so that they fully understand the product when speaking to yarn spinners and manufacturing companies.

Speaking of the barriers facing brands themselves, he said: “When you try to do something in a different way than what has been done before and change a process that involves so many people and so many parts of their organisations, it takes a lot for them to also change processes, to change behaviour, and to change decision-making parameters.”

Håkansson also conceded that a price premium comes attached to Renewcell’s product given the small volumes being produced – a factor that may be discouraging suppliers from purchasing and marketing materials that retail at a higher price point.

“We are charging a small premium for the low quantities that we are producing in this ramp-up phase, and it’s also a cost game out there so that is not benefitting our case,” he told analysts. “There has to be a stance taken for circularity for these to outweigh the cost differential that we are charging for these small volumes.”

However, he dismissed an analyst’s suggestion that price discounts might help the products move through the value chain quicker, saying that it would be “financially unsustainable”. Only with scale could the premium for Circulose come down, while fibres from the feedstock are already cost-competitive with other sustainable fibres such organic cotton and man-made cellulosic fibres (e.g. lyocell and modal), according to the company's Capital Markets Day Presentation.

For now, as evidenced in its interim report, Renewcell appears to have sufficient liquidity to cover two more quarters before it will need to consider ways to raise finance to avoid collapse.

Our signals coverage is powered by GlobalData’s Thematic Engine, which tags millions of data items across six alternative datasets — patents, jobs, deals, company filings, social media mentions and news — to themes, sectors and companies. These signals enhance our predictive capabilities, helping us to identify the most disruptive threats across each of the sectors we cover and the companies best placed to succeed. 

In early September new tech company Cetia launched its first centre for artificial intelligence (AI)-assisted textile and leather recycling in Hendaye, France.

Leveraging automation, robotics and artificial intelligence, Cetia’s aim is to build systems that can improve the performance and profitability of sorting, dismantling and recycling textiles. Among its innovations is a machine that uses AI to scan garments, identify hard elements such as zippers and buttons and then remove them via laser. French newspaper Le Figaro reports that this state-of-the-art equipment costs some €2m ($2.1m).

Cetia is said to be the first company in the world to produce a machine that automatically separates shoes from their soles – a seemingly unremarkable operation that is nevertheless unprecedented in the world of textile recycling. This proprietary system, for which two patents have been filed, uses robotics to remove glued, sewn, injected or vulcanised soles at a rate of 120 shoes per hour.

“There’s nothing spectacular in what we’ve done,” Cetia’s director Chloé Salmon Legagneur is quoted as saying in online publication Mint Lounge. “But we’ve done it.”

Backed by large retailers like Decathlon and Zalando, which are seeking industrial-scale solutions to textile recycling, the company’s work involves prototyping concepts and demonstrating their technical feasibility on an industrial scale. Cetia has received a €900,000 cash injection from eco-organisation Refashion, along with nearly €1m from France’s Nouvelle-Aquitaine region.

“Brands are telling us that they want their products’ textiles to be recycled in their own industry, rather than being used in insulation or flooring,” Legagneur told Le Figaro. At present, Europe recycles just 1% of used clothes into new clothes, and, in France alone, 700,000 tonnes of textiles are thrown away every year.

The challenge to date has been to separate textile fibres with enough precision and care for them to be usable in new garments – a process that is typically carried out by hand. However, Cetia’s AI-laser machine is said to be able to achieve this separation at a much faster rate.

The company’s AI-assisted machines can also sort clothes by colour and textile composition with a throughput of a garment per second. “This machine uses a near-infrared sensor to detect the garment's material quite accurately - whether it's 80% cotton, 20% polyester or 50/50,” Legagneur explains to Euro News.

"None of this is a magic idea. It's just common sense," she says. “But it's about putting together the engineers and the financing and the companies who need these solutions, and it's only now that these things are coming together. Ten years ago, no one wanted it.”

For now, the recycling innovations of Cetia constitute the first tentative step towards keeping the European textiles industry competitive, as companies brace themselves for the uncertain impact of the EU’s proposed Extended Producer Responsibility scheme for textiles.  

Our signals coverage is powered by GlobalData’s Thematic Engine, which tags millions of data items across six alternative datasets — patents, jobs, deals, company filings, social media mentions and news — to themes, sectors and companies. These signals enhance our predictive capabilities, helping us to identify the most disruptive threats across each of the sectors we cover and the companies best placed to succeed. 

Just Style’s investigation of UK public records has found that 28 Leicester textile companies went insolvent in 2022, while 11 have filed for insolvency to date in 2023. The records show insolvent companies in late 2022 included named suppliers of Boohoo.

Sajjad Khan of the Apparel and Textiles Manufacturers Federation said last year that, of approximately 500 textile businesses still trading in Leicester in 2020, only an estimated 180 were still trading in 2022.

Meanwhile, GlobalData’s filings database shows that mentions of “Leicester” in apparel company filings steeply dropped off in 2022 and 2023, falling from 95 mentions in 2021 to 69 mentions in 2022 to just 11 mentions this year. This coincides with the increasing prominence of Pakistan in apparel company filings, as loss-making fast fashion giants turn their attention to South Asia in the name of cost-cutting.

Fast fashion giants eye Pakistan in bid to slash costs

Leicester’s historic textile industry has taken a battering in recent months, as retailers have demanded price discounts, made last-minute cancellations and imposed financial penalties on their suppliers.

This comes as fast fashion firms like Boohoo (owner of PrettyLittleThing, Nasty Gal and MissPap) and ASOS post staggering losses and diminishing revenues: ASOS incurred losses of £290.9bn ($351.3bn) for the six-month period ending 28 February, while Boohoo’s operating losses increased by 80% year-on-year to £21.2m for the six months ending 31 August. The latter recently warned that full-year sales could fall as much as 17% this year, saying that it has identified £125m in potential cost savings.

Boohoo, which published a list of its 80 UK suppliers in 2021 in the name of transparency, has in recent years focused its efforts on extending its supply chain beyond the UK.

In September, Chairman of Boohoo Group Mahmud Kamani reportedly expressed an interest in establishing “long-term buying linkages with Pakistan”, while the country’s caretaker Prime Minister Anwaar-ul-Haq Kakar conveyed his commitment to facilitating investment and the building of manufacturing facilities within the country, according to Radio Pakistan.

Now, textile manufacturers in Leicester fear an exodus of retailers towards Pakistan, where garment workers have allegedly been paid as little as 29p an hour in “appalling conditions”. At the beginning of the month, hundreds of garment workers, trade unions and labour rights advocates took to the streets in Leicester, calling on fashion brands to commit to sustainable jobs in the city.

Just Style reached out to Leicester garment manufacturers that had previously been named as suppliers of Boohoo, but they did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Our signals coverage is powered by GlobalData’s Thematic Engine, which tags millions of data items across six alternative datasets — patents, jobs, deals, company filings, social media mentions and news — to themes, sectors and companies. These signals enhance our predictive capabilities, helping us to identify the most disruptive threats across each of the sectors we cover and the companies best placed to succeed. 

Global payments network and shopping assistant Klarna is rolling out 13 new AI-powered products, including AI-powered image search.

This follows the launch last month of Klarna’s conscious shopping dashboard, which empowers consumers to make sustainability-driven shopping decisions.

Shopping lens, the “flagship” new feature, will allow consumers to take pictures of styles and apparel in their surroundings and find out where to buy them online, using artificial intelligence to translate the image into a search term.

Another new tool will allow high-street shoppers to scan items’ barcodes in-store to give them access to product information and customer reviews, as well as allow them to find more competitive prices and different colours and variants online.

Klarna, which boasts 500,000 retail partners and 50 million SKUs in its database, has partnered with a huge range of fashion brands, from high-end Ralph Lauren and Agent Provocateur to fast fashion brands Boohoo and H&M, in the deployment of its shopping tools.

Asked by Bloomberg TV about the risk of consumers returning to online shopping, Klarna CEO Sebastian Siemiatkowski said: “For a while during Covid, we thought that nobody was going to return to physical stores. Now, we’ve seen that they have to a large degree. You’ll have these fluctuations. I think that over time, more and more so, those two experiences will merge to some degree.”

“What we wanted to make sure of with Klarna is that whether you’re in physical stores and using our photo lens to scan the barcode or take an image of the item, or whether you’re looking at something on your screen, those two should lead to the same opportunity of comparing alternatives, understanding who can ship that product the fastest, etc.”

According to GlobalData's job analytics, Klarna advertised for 17 job roles related to AI from January to mid-October this year, compared to none over the same period in 2022. This is reflective of Klarna's drive to diversify beyond its buy now, pay later history into an "AI-powered" shopping assistant, as it feels the financial squeeze of higher interest rates on BNPL firms.

Allowing eco-conscious consumers to shop sustainably

In September, Klarna debuted a sustainability dashboard that allows consumers to access sustainability-oriented products, features and services. The tool spotlights brands with circular services to reduce waste and maximise product use, and it features a CO2e tracker.

The dashboard will also serve as a “repository” for editorial and educational content designed to enhance consumers’ understanding of sustainable practices.

"Klarna is dedicated to transforming shopping into a more circular and sustainable experience by facilitating more informed decisions and providing our 150 million consumers with tools to discover more environmentally responsible products,” said Salah Said, head of sustainability, Klarna.

Tools to help consumers make informed shopping choices reflect an increasing demand among consumers for increased information transparency.

In May, a digital consumer behaviour report by Avery Dennison, a leading materials science and digital identification solutions company, found that two-thirds of global fashion shoppers desire more transparency regarding the provenance of garments.

Meanwhile, GlobalData’s Q3 2023 global consumer survey found that the ethics, environmentalism and social responsibility of a product or service always or often influence product choice among 45% of consumers (compared to 47% in Q3 2022), while 43% said that low prices and affordability are an essential factor when buying goods (compared to 40% in Q3 2022).

Our signals coverage is powered by GlobalData’s Thematic Engine, which tags millions of data items across six alternative datasets — patents, jobs, deals, company filings, social media mentions and news — to themes, sectors and companies. These signals enhance our predictive capabilities, helping us to identify the most disruptive threats across each of the sectors we cover and the companies best placed to succeed. 

On 28 September US tech giant Apple filed a patent for a touch-sensitive smart textile containing conductive threads that is “configured to detect the occurrence of a touch, the location of a touch, and/or the force of a touch”.

Apple said the smart touch-sensitive textile may be incorporated into articles of clothing or any textile-based garment, as well as wearable electronic devices.

The conductive threads, they say, can be made from a variety of yarns, including copper yarn, silver yarn, or coated nonconductive natural or synthetic fibres.

The patent application features an illustration of a man using his shirt to operate an electronic device. 

This is not Apple’s first venture into futuristic textiles. In 2022, the company filed a patent for a “fabric control device” which enables technology and sensors to be embedded into fabric, having previously been granted patents for Smart Apple Watch woven bands and buttons.

The company's persistent interest in smart fabrics suggests it is exploring the addition of controls to a wide variety of consumer items, including clothing.

Smart clothing is yet to gain traction amongst apparel heavyweights

Despite digital and smart clothing being popular buzzwords they have yet to gain traction in the wider apparel industry.

US denim company Levi Strauss & Co. collaborated with tech giant Google on the Jacquard “smart jacket” in 2020, for example, however it largely fell flat, with Google shutting down its smart fabric app last April.

US sportswear company Under Armour has also dabbled in the embedded tech market with biometric running trainers, however the company’s corresponding app looks set to disappear off the map in 2025.

In a report on wearable tech in apparel, business analyst company GlobalData attributed the slow growth to “lack of technological maturity”, “improper marketing positioning” and “lack of awareness among consumers”.

The growth of the tech wearables market, however, may well spur a resurgence of interest across the apparel industry.

Sleek wearable fitness monitor WHOOP burst onto the scene back in 2012, and has since gone on to disrupt a category which was meant to be the new frontier for the likes of US sports brand Nike and Under Armour.

Valued at $3.6bn in 2021, the company has since gone on to bring out a line of fitness apparel, including boxers, bralettes, leggings and performance tops, that can monitor biometrics such as heart rate, blood oxygen, skin temperature, and more.

Google has also revealed an interest in apparel-integrated tech, filing for a patent in April 2023 for a smart footwear system. The footwear uses sensors and machine-learned exercise identification models to identify a wide range of exercise movements, including upper-body exercises such as bench-press or barbell curl.

Our signals coverage is powered by GlobalData’s Thematic Engine, which tags millions of data items across six alternative datasets — patents, jobs, deals, company filings, social media mentions and news — to themes, sectors and companies. These signals enhance our predictive capabilities, helping us to identify the most disruptive threats across each of the sectors we cover and the companies best placed to succeed. 

US retail behemoth Target announced on Tuesday (26 September) that it would shut nine stores on 21 October, citing the threat of “theft and organised retail crime”.

The affected stores include a New York City store in Harlem, two in Seattle, three in the San Francisco/Oakland area and three in Portland, Oregon.

Target said: “We cannot continue operating these stores because theft and organised retail crime are threatening the safety of our team and guests and contributing to unsustainable business performance.”

The decision was taken in spite of “heavy” investment in theft-prevention strategies such as more security team members, third-party guard services and theft-deterrent tools.

Target said it would continue to make “significant investments” in cyber defence technology, advanced threat intelligence capabilities and expanded data alerts and analysis, among other tools.

Retail theft – a growing problem or a convenient cover for inventory mismanagement?

Retailers have become increasingly vocal about the losses inflicted by theft and organised crime. Back in May, Target said it was on track to lose $1bn this year from inventory shrink driven by theft.

And last month, US omnichannel retailer Dick’s Sporting Goods blamed theft for poor Q2 results, with CEO Lauren Hobart calling the trend “alarming” on an earnings call, while US footwear retailer Foot Locker warned that ever-growing theft and weak consumer spending would weigh on its earnings forecast for the year.

However, the National Retail Security Survey, from the US' National Retail Federation, published on 26 September, found that on average retailers reported inventory shrink of 1.6% in 2022 – up slightly on 2021 (1.4%) and in line with shrink rates in 2019 and 2020.

That percentage has hovered around 1.4% for more than a decade. In other words, one of the key metrics for measuring theft remains largely unchanged. When taken as a percentage of total retail sales in 2022, the average shrink percentage (1.6%) represents $112.1bn in losses – up 19% on 2021.

According to the 177 retail brands surveyed, external theft accounted for an average of 36% of total inventory loss, while process, control failures and errors accounted for 27% of total losses.

The more cynical might say that organised retail theft has become a convenient cover for internal flaws such as bloated inventories, heavy discounting, and employee theft.

“Shrink has been going up but sometimes it’s very difficult to unpack how much is down to theft and how much is down to internal retailer issues and stumbles,” Neil Saunders, a retail analyst at GlobalData tells Just Style.

“Shrink does take money off margins, we know that, but there’s too much opacity in the way in which it’s reported and it is being partly used as an excuse for generally bad performance.”

Saunders notes that Target, in particular, has a “fragmented” supply chain and is “not always the best at managing its own inventory”, meaning that “it's very easy for things to be misallocated and misaccounted for within that.”

“I’m sure bundled in with their number there’s a lot of things where Target has just lost stuff, broken stuff, put stuff in the wrong stores, put it in the wrong location, can’t find it.”

Better inventory management, radio-frequency identification (RFID), and ambient retail

The multi-faceted problem of inventory shrink calls for a variety of solutions.

US department store chain Nordstrom, whose CEO Erik Nordstrom warned analysts in August that the company was suffering historic losses from theft, announced the ramping up of “RFID initiatives” to deliver “additional operational efficiencies”.

US-based children's retailer Carter’s also said it was leveraging RFID to monitor the real-time locations of products and better manage inventory levels, while US clothing retailer American Eagle said in a call with analysts in May that it was using RFID in combination with AI-based tech to provide accurate inventory and location visibility.

Some retailers are ahead of the curve in this respect: Spanish fashion conglomerate Inditex has been embedding RFID chips into its clothing tags since 2014, and this March, the Zara-owner announced it would begin sewing RFID directly into garments and phase out hard anti-theft tags.

External theft might also be averted through ambient retail innovations. Amazon recently integrated RFID technology into its Just Walk Out customer vision-based system, which will allow for checkout-free shopping for its clothing and softline merchandise. Combined with QR codes and machine vision, Amazon Go stores have implemented what could be described as a theft-proof model.

Some theft-prevention technologies, however, may prove unpopular with customers. In March, UK fashion conglomerate Frasers Group introduced facial recognition biometric cameras in its Sports Direct and Flannel stores, which scan shoppers' faces and check them against a database of suspected criminals. The group told the BBC in April that its live face-recognition cameras have brought about "a significant reduction in the number of criminal offences taking place in our stores".

However, campaign groups like the UK's Big Brother Watch have dubbed non-consensual face scanning "Orwellian". The Information Commissioner's Office in the UK stated at the time that it was investigating if this use was lawful.

Our signals coverage is powered by GlobalData’s Thematic Engine, which tags millions of data items across six alternative datasets — patents, jobs, deals, company filings, social media mentions and news — to themes, sectors and companies. These signals enhance our predictive capabilities, helping us to identify the most disruptive threats across each of the sectors we cover and the companies best placed to succeed. 

The non-profit organisation Apparel Impact Institute (AII) has announced the first round of recipients of grants from its $250m Fashion Climate Fund.

Financed by philanthropic partners including H&M Foundation, H&M Group, Lululemon, The PVH Foundation, Target and the Schmidt Family Foundation, the fund rewards lead innovators of carbon reduction solutions for the fashion industry, with funding criteria based on effectiveness, reach, scale and cost.

The Fashion Climate Fund is targeting a carbon reduction goal of 100 million tonnes (or 0.1 gigatonnes) from the apparel supply chain by 2030 and has its eyes on unlocking $2bn in blended capital towards verified impact solutions.

Grant recipients include Precision Development, which has developed Leaf Colour Charts, a low-tech and low-cost methodology to reduce fertiliser application in cotton cultivation – the highest emission source in cotton extraction. The funding will be used to deploy these charts in India, alongside training for farmers.

Deutsche Gesellschaft für Internationale Zusammenarbeit (GIZ) received grant funding to support its solar PV installation project in Bangladesh. The funding will be used to conduct “techno-feasibility assessment” for 30 textile facilities over the next three years.

Made2Flow, a specialist in data gathering and validation software for fashion supply chains, is another beneficiary. Its funding will be used to add to the functionality of its software, with the development of automated and customised impact reduction recommendations for facilities.

BluWin has also received funding to finance the deployment of Clean by Design’s framework of best practices across Tier 1 and Tier 2 facilities in Bangladesh, while PwC will use funds to implement its Cleaner Production System project across Tier 2 and Tier 3 suppliers in India and Bangladesh.

However, AII says the initial submissions for Climate Solutions Portfolio grants has revealed a research gap in two important areas: thermal energy and energy storage. “Filling this research gap,” it says “is essential to further identify and scale decarbonisation solutions successfully.”

According to the World Resources Institute current business-as-usual growth projections suggest emissions across the global apparel sector will grow to 1.588GT by 2030. This is well behind schedule to deliver the 45% absolute reduction needed across all sectors to limit warming to the Paris Agreement’s goal, so AII hopes to account for approximately 10% of the needed emission reductions through its Fashion Climate Fund.

In AII's June 2023 Taking Stock of Progress Against Roadmap to Net Zero report, AII and the World Resources Institute identified six key interventions for how the apparel sector can reduce greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions – maximising material efficiency, scaling more sustainable materials and practice, accelerating the development of innovative materials, maximising energy efficiency, eliminating coal in manufacturing, and shifting to 100% renewable energy.

Our signals coverage is powered by GlobalData’s Thematic Engine, which tags millions of data items across six alternative datasets — patents, jobs, deals, company filings, social media mentions and news — to themes, sectors and companies. These signals enhance our predictive capabilities, helping us to identify the most disruptive threats across each of the sectors we cover and the companies best placed to succeed. 

At Nike’s annual meeting of shareholders on 12 September, Nike shareholders rejected a proposal for the board to issue a report assessing the efficacy of its supply chain due diligence efforts.

The proposal, brought by Tulipshare which owns at least $25,000 of Class B stock, recommended that the Air Jordan maker issue a report covering the methodology and metrics used to measure performance on forced labour and wage theft risks, alongside other disclosures.

“Nike has not disclosed adequate analysis regarding the efficacy of traceability steps taken to address the risks of alleged Uyghur forced labour across its supply chain tiers, nor does Nike disclose engagement with affected rightsholders or whether remedies are satisfactory to victims,” Samuel Collins-Charles, Tulipshare’s communications manager, said in a pre-recorded message during the annual meeting.

He cited Nike’s compliance with only six of seventeen Sustainable Development goals under the UN Global Compact, and its alleged violation of OECD guidelines in its treatment of Cambodian and Thai garment workers.

Collins-Charles also raised the spectre of the EU’s 2022 corporate sustainability due diligence directive, which requires companies like Nike to identify, prevent, end or mitigate adverse impacts on human rights.

“Rather than risk the significant negative financial consequences of failing to comply with this regulation and potentially losing European market share,“ Collins-Charles said, “we are asking you for your vote to ensure Nike assesses the effectiveness of its existing supply chain management structure and safeguard the company and its investors from financial, legal and reputational risks.”

Nike’s shareholders, however, rejected the proposal, with the board of directors calling it “unnecessary” and citing Nike’s “commitment to ethical practices” across its operations and supply chain which “begins at the highest level”.

Nike’s opposition statement made frequent reference to its “Supplier Code of Conduct”, which “lays out minimum standards Nike expects each supplier to meet in producing Nike products and includes strict requirements regarding forced and child labour, excessive overtime, compensation, and freedom of association, among other requirements.”

Collins-Charles countered that “traditional codes of conduct such as these put the onus entirely on the supplier to uphold human rights, which is not realistic and has a very weak track record of effectiveness, as it does not acknowledge Nike’s role in human rights impacts.”

Instead, the proposal recommends the adoption of the American Bar Association’s Model Contract Clauses, which aim at ensuring responsible purchasing practices, such as reasonable assistance to suppliers, responsible exit, and victim remedies. Collins-Charles says that such clauses “bridge [the] gap [between suppliers and Nike] by advocating for a shared responsibility approach”.

Our signals coverage is powered by GlobalData’s Thematic Engine, which tags millions of data items across six alternative datasets — patents, jobs, deals, company filings, social media mentions and news — to themes, sectors and companies. These signals enhance our predictive capabilities, helping us to identify the most disruptive threats across each of the sectors we cover and the companies best placed to succeed.