My definition of circular fashion is an industry in which resources and products stay in use for as long as possible before being recycled or regenerated into new products, again and again. Today, we have the same kind of responsibility, and also the opportunity, to make “circular fashion” just as attractive or even more attractive. H&M Group, and the fashion industry as a whole, has for many years excelled at making fashion desirable and attractive. Vanessa Rothschild: I think we can play a central role in both of those. What will it take to shift consumer perception? And, more important, what will it take to shift consumer behavior? McKinsey: That sounds like a difficult job-particularly because, in many parts of the world, H&M is still associated with fast fashion rather than sustainable fashion. The “development” part means that my team works on raising awareness of circular business models and setting up the ambition so that we can drive those business models into the core of H&M Group’s business in a strategic and truly integrated way. The “steering” part of my job means my team works on steering mechanisms that help make sustainability a natural part of our everyday decisions: what we are being measured on, our KPIs, and so on. Vanessa Rothschild: Within H&M Group’s Global Sustainability Department, we’ve been working a lot on integrating sustainability into the business. What does it mean? What are your primary responsibilities? The following are edited excerpts of the conversation. Rothschild spoke with McKinsey’s Karl-Hendrik Magnus and Monica Toriello about the future of sustainable fashion. Today, as H&M Group’s global sustainability steering and development manager, Rothschild and her colleagues work to define and achieve the company’s sustainability goals, which include using only sustainable materials by 2030 and having a “climate positive” value chain-one that reduces more greenhouse gases than it emits-by 2040. So says Vanessa Rothschild, who has helped lead the company’s sustainability efforts for more than four years. The company, which operates some 5,000 stores in 70-plus countries, believes it has both the responsibility and a tremendous opportunity to change consumer behavior. H &M Group, the world’s second-largest clothing retailer, is betting that people will choose and buy clothes differently from the way they have in the past-and it sees itself as a potential catalyst for that change.
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