ne offering, Sussan Group needed a sustainability framework that was easily understandable both from the perspective of the internal team and the customer. “I’ve been with the group for 25 years and we’ve always had community impact, social impact, and empowering women as part of our DNA. And I was starting to work on a lot of our environmental impact as well, and starting to put together a bit of an action plan,” Rebecca Hard, the Sussan Group’s CEO, told Inside Retail. “We met Andrew and his team at B Lab [the non-profit that oversees the B Corp certification process] and went through the B Corp certification process. I knew it was a high benchmark to achieve, but after going through the framework, it felt aligned to the DNA of our business.” The B Corp framework gave the Sussan Group “a road map to say, ‘this isn’t the total impact we can have.’ It recognised the great work we were doing and enabled us to create a great action plan for the future,” Hard said. In turn, the B Corp certification has enabled the business to improve its storytelling around its existing sustainability practices.  “I’m the first to admit we haven’t done a great job of talking about the great things we do as a business, we’ve just sort of always gone ahead and done it,” Hard said. “It’s important for people to understand, especially people looking at us as an employer, the role we can play within the industry to prove that some of these things are possible even though, when we started the journey two years ago, it was a big hurdle to get over.” The daunting task of the group achieving B Corp certification raised doubts from onlookers, Hard said, but her approach was to “just keep trying because if we improve many things, that’s going to be better than where we were”. The Group scored well in the areas of people and social impact, while its environmental impact needed fine-tuning. “It was no surprise,” Hard said. Of all the brands in the Group’s portfolio, Sussan had the strongest sustainability score. “We’ve always had a good ethical sourcing component and great relationships with suppliers,” Hard said. “It was about working with them, and internally with our team to understand, in particular, how we ensure that the garments we’re putting into the market have the best or the least environmental impact.” Despite having officially obtained B Corp certification, Hard said the Sussan Group is only just starting the journey: “We know we’ve got a long way to go.” While other proposed solutions to the problem of textile waste put the onus on consumers to recycle or properly dispose of used clothing, Hard believes it’s the companies creating garments that “need to find a way to solve this for the consumer, not the other way around”. For the past couple of years, Hard has focused on partnering with suppliers and “learning from others already doing some great work”. As a mass-market apparel company, she firmly believes the ethical sourcing of apparel and accessories “shouldn’t be restricted to customers that can afford luxury brands, it needs to be across all attainable brands as well”. As a result of this, the Sussan Group has started using responsible fibres that have less impact on the environment. “We’ve done a big piece of work on understanding our emissions right through the value chain,” Hard said, adding it’s enabled the business to be targeted in where to innovate next. Communication and unified approach The Group has recently launched a website that houses its three brands and a unified LinkedIn page. The idea for this came out of the B Corp journey and  Hard said it will enable “a lot more communication about impact work and a lot more of our storytelling”. In 2025, the business will communicate more about the innovation behind the Group’s garments and how the incorporation of responsible fibres is minimising their environmental impact. “We’ve done quite a bit of this with the Sussan brand; Sportsgirl and Suzanne Grae started that in the last 12 months,” Hard said. Part of this will be about promoting “citizen behaviour change” – in other words, how consumers can care for their garments and get them to last and wear longer. “Sportsgirl is one of our most fashionable brands, but it still has 40-50 per cent of the garments in the range of what I would call great wardrobe staples,” Hard said. “They’re garments you can wear for years and years, and it’s not going have that really fast-forward fashion lens where you’ve got to churn those garments and move them out of your wardrobe. This also ties in with Sussan Group’s commitment to circularity as a founding member of the Seamless product stewardship scheme. Recently, the Group had its first circular design meeting with its design team, and it will start to run some pilots next year around how it can design garments for the circular economy, Hard said. “We’ve been working behind the scenes on the first fully compostable T-shirt, where, when you finish it, you can pop it in your compost bin and put that back into the soil,” she said. “We just wanted to do a few of those projects and start to scale those up.”  As Hard noted, “Clothing is here to stay and we’ve got to find a way to solve that sustainable problem for the consumer.” In the near term, that will involve QR codes on products that link to a website with care information and education. Currently, the Group works with Upparel to offer a textile recycling option. Customers can obtain a discount code directly from the brand to initiate the process of returning end-of-life pieces and even gain a credit to use towards purchasing new items of clothing from the brand. Hard admitted the solutions to textile waste are not at the level the industry requires, but she said it’s important to take action now, even if it’s on a small scale. “If we can try and scale something now, while we’re all at this early infancy stage, and work together on what those solutions could be, we’re excited to find some scalable solutions, ultimately, for how garments are recycled at the end-of-life,” Hard said.