The latest creative strategies and tools helping organizations to engage their teams in building market-leading, purpose-driven brands.
The Environmental Audit Committee is calling on the UK government to make fashion retailers take responsibility for the waste they create.
Strengthening a culture is not a one-off project; it is truly never-ending.
When a statement is too generic, it can be challenging for employees to connect to it and for the entire organization to be galvanized by that social purpose.
Cross-Posted from Walking the Talk. So, what do a slave-free chocolate brand, an activist bank and a blindfolded panel of diversity experts have in common?
As part of our CSR strategy, we strategically aligned our programming based on three Sustainable Development Goals.
An engaged workforce is critical to an organization’s success, no matter what products or services you’re selling.
Industries, companies and governments are retooling for the future, driven by the sustainability imperatives of climate change; resource, food and water scarcity; social polarization and rising income inequality. Universities and colleges are no exception. The future will be won by organizations that were proactive, not those that defended the status quo. As with other industries, the post-secondary sector is undergoing a transition as it explores its reason for existence. Does it equip students and professionals for future roles? Yes. Does it also equip its administrators to contribute their expertise, resources, assets and investments to contribute to societal outcomes? Slowly, but surely.
This is one of a series of interviews by students and alumni from the Minneapolis College of Art and Design (MCAD) with practitioners from the Sustainable Brands community, on a variety of ways organizations can, and are, Redesigning the Good Life.
“You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.” — R. Buckminster Fuller
Much has been said about how to grow a company and sustain that growth over time. From building a sales funnel and forming strategic partnerships to implementing the right IT systems and establishing parameters for how employees interact with each other, with management and customers, there is no shortage of advice.
Corporate culture sets the groundwork for how your team interacts with each other and your customers.
Every day, millions of Americans drink, on average, 2.1 cups of coffee; each cup takes about a hundred beans to brew1. Each bean must go through harvesting, wet milling, drying, dry milling, storing, shipping, trucking, roasting, grinding and packaging before it is available for us to pick off a store shelf and bring home to brew. Coffee may be simple to prepare in the home — especially if you have a Keurig machine on your counter — but the work behind such a ubiquitous beverage is incredibly complex and starts, as with most things we love, with people.
Jennifer Motles and her colleagues at Philip Morris International (PMI) are on a crusade to end smoking. They know many of us probably won’t believe them. And they are OK with that; they just want the chance to prove it.
Hospitality giants Sandals Resorts International (SRI) and Caesars Entertainment have joined the growing, cross-sector fight against single-use plastics with ambitious phase-out plans for plastic straws and stirrers.
The Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) offer many business opportunities for companies while addressing critical operational risks, according to a new report produced by audit, tax and advisory firm KPMG LLP; in partnership with the non-profit organization, Textile Exchange: Threading the Needle: Weaving the Sustainable Development Goals into the Textile, Retail and Apparel Industry.
“Break down the silos” has become a bit of a catchphrase for business in the last decade, as companies have come to realize the benefits of cross-departmental collaboration. Today's sustainability teams charged with boosting the impact of their initiatives could gain a lot by adopting this mantra, too. Whether the goal is to cut CO2 emissions, reduce waste, conserve resources or all of the above, more and more brands have sustainability strategies in place. But making them a meaningful part of your brand is another story.
Who are you and why should I care? Since the 1950s, companies have turned to externally focused branding methods to answer these questions that consumers have about their businesses. Today, companies face an increasingly hyperconnected, skeptical marketplace where customers are demanding more. They want to know the substance beyond the sizzle of advertising. For branding to remain the economic engine it has been over the past 70 years, we need to ask: What’s next?
60 members of the Partnership for Sustainable Textiles have revealed concrete action plans to ensure humane working conditions, greater environmental protection and fair wages in their own companies and in their suppliers’ production facilities. The Partnership — a multi-stakeholder coalition made up of companies, associations, NGOs, trade unions, standards organisations and the Federal German Government, formed in 2014 with the aim of making improvements along the entire textile supply chain —considers this a major step forward, as it means that many members agree on revealing even sensible information for the first time.
The Liverpool City Council is committed to becoming the first climate-positive authority in the world by the end of 2018, through a groundbreaking partnership with the nonprofit Poseidon Foundation, in a bid to make Liverpool the world’s first climate-positive city by the end of 2020.
Energy and sustainability are inherently linked. Energy efficiency pays dividends by trimming consumption and costs. According to the International Energy Agency (IEA), implementing energy efficiency initiatives is the best way to act on climate change, as it can reduce CO2 emissions by 38 percent. However, becoming an efficient, sustainable business requires a collaborative effort from almost all parts of an organization.