Sustainability consultants are fashion’s newest influencers

Future. Sustainability consultants are quietly changing the culture of fashion. Once merely advisors, these trendsetters are now developing products and helping brands innovate beyond entry-level sustainability. In a few short years, they’ve become eco fashion’s most influential agents of change.

Disruptive sustainability
When sustainability went mainstream a few years ago, consultancies helped fashion brands understand the greener landscape. It was about education and strategy — and even PR.

Now they’re also creating disruptive products that extend their influence beyond external consulting.

Cat food?
Sustainability consultancy Futerra has launched an insect-based cat food in plastic-free packaging called LoveBug (it’s a collaboration with Mars Petcare).

Why does this matter? Because sustainability consultancies in fashion are also pivoting away from advising to creating products that “find a problem in an industry and solve it.”

Thinking differently
Along with creating disruptive products, consultants like Eco-Age are pushing clients away from focusing heavily on carbon neutrality and towards focusing on climate positivity. In other words, they’re changing the sustainability ethos of brands.

More niche advisories like Future Fabrics Ltd (the advising arm of the Future Fabrics Expo) are helping brands focus on changing materials and away from “low hanging fruit” like switching to renewable energy.

Internal purpose with external output
Consultants believe their external roles (as opposed to in-house positions) gives them the added benefit of influencing a brand’s culture from an unwavering outsider’s perspective.

• Create Sustain co-founder Alex McIntosh said: “When you’re embedded in a business, there are so many pressures and demands that you live in the short-term. You need people to lift you out of that space…”

Vogue Business suggested these external “influencers” are changing the culture within brands, as they inject excitement and energy that feels less corporate — less “on-brand.”

A young consultancy named CogDis turned this into a tagline that defines the role of today’s sustainability consultants: “Aligning internal purpose with external output.”