Sustainability is becoming impossible to ignore in the outdoor industry. In this series, we look to our industry leaders for guidance, inspiration, and best practices in sustainable business in the outdoor-product space. Breaking Trail is an Outdoor Retailer Series that is powered by Walden Hyde. Here, Walden Hyde speaks with Kevin Myette, Director of Product and Supply Chain Sustainability for REI.

Kevin Myette is the Director of Product and Supply Chain Sustainability for REI

What does sustainability mean to you? To your company?
Sustainability is a bit of a charged word for me because oftentimes it’s viewed as finite and absolute when it really describes the state of a system.

For REI, it’s about understanding what makes up that system and what keeps it in balance. All products have some sort of negative impact, there’s no such thing as a truly “sustainable” product… at least not yet. If you go too deep into one aspect of the dimensions of sustainability, another one is bound to suffer.

In my role as Director of Product and Supply Chain Sustainability for REI, I need to know and understand how the system is measured and work on improvement from there. I’m committed to understanding the system since you can’t manage what you don’t measure.

What’s involved in understanding the system?
More than just thinking about how to take action, we have to consider how we measure success, which takes a great deal of time.

We could have gone down the path of developing tools to measure different aspects of sustainability as it applies to our business alone, but if everyone makes their own scales, it’d be like the Wild West. You can’t play a game without agreed upon rules, and the industry is still defining how sustainability should be approached. I helped co-found the original Eco Index because we needed a universal, cross-industry vetted “yardstick” to be most effective.

Since REI has so many vendors that sell to us, we’ve spent our energy bringing the industry together and being a catalyst for figuring out measurements that we all can use.

What are you doing that is exceptionally important?
REI is well respected in the outdoor space, and, because we sell many other brands, we’re in a unique position to be a connector between brands and organizations.

Most companies have been willing to put aside their competitive tendencies on this topic and collaborate to create common tools to measure sustainability. Sustainability is a team sport, and our position in the industry allows us to really act as the glue that holds a lot of this together.

Additionally, because REI has its own brands and supply chain, we’ve become very adept at using the Higg Index. We can help product manufacturers and material suppliers understand how to apply it as well. Scaling our influence in the supply chain is really important and challenging, so when we decided to do a hands-on in-country training session in Vietnam, we extended our reach by asking other brands if they want to join us. The Higg Index facility level training we are conducting at the end of March in Ho Chi Minh City will include Columbia Sportswear, Mountain Hardwear, MEC, Patagonia, The North Face/VF, and Osprey.

Collaboration increases our, and the industry’s, effectiveness with the supply chain on this topic ten-fold.

In addition to being a connector between brands, REI also connects customers to many brands. How does REI engage customers in terms of sustainability?

Even though talking more frankly and succinctly with consumers about sustainability is a dream for outdoor companies actively involved in sustainability, what keeps me up at night is how little we all understand. So in terms of our own sustainability—and the sustainability of our vast and complex supply chains—I’m focused on first building better mechanisms to understand and report appropriately.

Ultimately we will tie the consumer back into the conversation so that they can be a positive influence for making products better and more sustainable. It’s a vast topic and ongoing conversation at REI.

With regards to people’s personal sustainability, REI has an opportunity to educate the customer about the actions they can take. We can reach customers through product hangtags, sales floor staff, and REI.com.  Our customers will notice we offer REI-brand items with reduced packaging and made with materials that are less impactful on the planet.  We also publish an annual stewardship report on our website to be transparent in our actions with employees, customers, the industry, and others. We have so much work to do here, but it is a great opportunity to engage with our customers on something really important.

What motivates REI to do this?
Aside from being built into our organizational ethos and core purpose, it makes good business sense. Sustainability means managing business more efficiently.

On a high level, we know we live in resource-constrained world. We need to do a better job understanding what’s happening and how to best manage it because it puts our supply chain at risk.

Increasing regulations and increasing concerns from NGOs are other considerations. The better we can address our systems, the better we can make it unnecessary to reactively address issues later.

In addition to these risk mitigation factors, there are also direct positive benefits to addressing sustainability. It’s a wonderful way to engage employees and inspire innovation.

For instance, some of our designers have already been able to reduce material waste in their products using the Higg Index. With one style alone we saved enough material to hypothetically cover the field at the Seahawks CenturyLink football field.

Employees have also inspired us to consider how to cut waste in cardboard shipping boxes for bicycles. We were able to remove 50% of waste, make all the packaging out of a single material, and make the boxes easier to recycle and less costly.

What’s keeping you from doing more?
There are only 25 hours in day.

But seriously, even though there are a group of companies working together to do what they can, to really make a big difference we need many more businesses on board. It’s very easy to measure profit in the triple-bottom-line, but there are plenty of organizations that aren’t yet convinced that they need to spend time on the people and planet side of the equation. We haven’t yet articulated the best business cases and it is still too easy for senior leaders in organizations to ‘kick that can down the road’.

When we have been successful, we’ve seen a shift in brands, suppliers and facilities from “You’re here to judge me” to “You’re here to improve my business.”

Once we can do that across a spectrum of supply chain stakeholders, we’ll be able to gain traction.

Where do you see this going in the next 5 years?
It would be great if the word sustainability becomes unnecessary in the near future. We need to get to the place where making responsible products really just means making great products.

It has to be the thing that businesses consider, not the next thing that’s somewhere in the future. We’re already beginning to see organizations, suppliers, and brands using the Higg Index to benchmark their efforts and engage in the race to the top. Getting more organizations involved will supercharge our efforts.

One of the best things we can do is to get REI’s merchandise teams to ask vendors to show and share what they are already doing. We’ll begin to favor those companies that use the Higg Index as backdrop for their sustainability efforts before they’re even asked. I can see it becoming even more of an indicator of what brands we want to do business with.
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About REI
REI is a national outdoor retail co-op dedicated to inspiring, educating and outfitting its members and the community for a lifetime of outdoor adventure and stewardship. Founded in 1938 by a group of Pacific Northwest mountaineers seeking quality equipment, REI is committed to promoting environmental stewardship and increasing access to outdoor recreation through volunteerism, gear donations and financial contributions.

About Kevin Myette
Kevin Myette is the Director of Product and Supply Chain Sustainability for REI. Specifically, Kevin has the responsibility for managing the organization’s product sustainability programs—for both the private and wholesale brands. Prior to the sustainability role, Kevin oversaw product quality, safety and research & testing.

Kevin is a 30 year veteran of the outdoor and cycling industries with 26 years with REI. He is a member of, and has participated in, a number of groups promoting better understanding of product quality, standards, testing, safety, environmental considerations, and fair labor assurance for products and supply chains. He is a member of the OIA Sustainability Working Group Advisory Council and the Board of Directors for the Sustainable Apparel Coalition.

In the outdoors he is a passionate road cyclist and mountain biker; downhill, backcountry and XC skier; hiker, backpacker, mountaineer, kayaker, wakeboarder, etc.

He has a degree from Williams College and is married with two wonderful daughters who think it’s crazy that he still comes home from mountain biking with fresh wounds.

Sustainability is becoming impossible to ignore in the outdoor industry. In this series, we look to our industry leaders for guidance, inspiration, and best practices in sustainable business in the outdoor-product space. Breaking Trail is an Outdoor Retailer Series that is powered by Walden Hyde. Here, Walden Hyde speaks with Adam Mott, Senior Manager of Corporate Sustainability at The North Face, about The North Face’s priorities and the power of collaboration.

Adam Mott, Senior Manager of Corporate Sustainability at The North Face

What does sustainability mean to you? To your company?
From a company perspective, sustainability is a license to operate. It is about ensuring your viability to continue to do business by recognizing your impact and implementing responsible business practices that promote the long term health of the planet and its inhabitants. It is about considering environmental and social responsibility in your everyday decision-making.

Environmental responsibility is a personal passion for me, so I feel so fortunate to work for a company that is on this path. Sustainability is rooted in our values at The North Face. We inherently want to protect the places we love to explore. And given our size and influence in the industry, we have a responsibility to act as a leader.

What are you doing that is exceptionally important?
Our biggest impact is in manufacturing. We took a step back and asked ourselves how we can make technical products without doing harm to the environment. We focused in on the factory level, working with bluesign® to help our vendors make changes in their facilities to address energy, chemical and water use as well as onsite health and safety.

We also use our size to bring more sustainable practices to our supply chain to hopefully have a positive influence on the whole industry. The industry will benefit from better practices at factories, and The North Face can be the tipping point to push factories to make those changes.

The North Face also works with other outdoor organizations such as Outdoor Industry Association (OIA) to establish best practices, such as the Higg Index. People from other industries have been impressed at how much collaboration there is in the outdoor industry.

How will the Higg Index fit with The North Face’s current measurement system?
Since we were part of the development and beta testing of the original Eco Index (before it was incorporated into the Higg Index), what we’ve been measuring internally has helped inform the development of the Higg Index. We’ve seen this tool evolve and there is a real opportunity for the Higg Index to guide companies in the development of products in the future. We are currently testing the implementation of the Higg Index and contributing to its development, while continuing to use our internal evaluation system which is a more basic evaluation tool. When the Higg Index is scalable, we will decide how we can integrate it into our product development process.

What are other areas of focus for The North Face, in terms of sustainability?
Getting people outdoors to explore is really important to us. This exposure to the outdoors creates a virtuous cycle where people learn to care about the places they explore and become invested in protecting the environment.

Partnerships and support of groups we trust are essential to moving ideas into action. We are proud of the relationships we have built through our Explore York Parks and Explore Fund programs and the significant investments we’ve made in organizations such as the Conservation Alliance. We’ve also been collaborating with organizations to talk about climate change to kids and adults. It’s usually such gloom and doom, but we take a different approach with these groups to make the topic more interesting and relevant.

So what’s your approach?
To engage kids, we worked with Protect Our Winters and Alliance for Climate Education to create the Hot Planet Cool Athletes program that we present at schools. The North Face athletes show videos of their exciting outdoor sports and explain why they care about climate change. It engages students who may aspire to be like them. At the end of the presentations, they ask the students to sign up to just do one thing to help the environment and post it to the Alliance for Climate Education site.

The North Face also supports and promotes James Balog’s Extreme Ice Survey which provides a visual image to the threat of climate change. No one can see glacial melting in real time, but if you can show people what’s really happening in a two-minute time lapse video of 3 years of footage, it is much more impactful than charts and graphs. Recently we took this partnership even further by creating the Everest Ice Survey since Mt. Everest is such an iconic premier mountaineering destination that is representative of what we do as a brand.

What’s keeping you from doing more?
We have had significant success in addressing material selection and resource efficiency; however we need to make systematic changes to create true, long term sustainable success. This is challenging and takes time. It requires people to rethink how we make things and redefine success to add environmental considerations to the typical business considerations. It requires a commitment to developing innovative solutions that benefit the environment, customer and business. Environmental and social responsibility need to be more deeply embedded in the design ethos so we can avoid problems before manufacturing; we won’t have to fix mistakes later if we never create their precursors in the first place. We make highly technical gear, so it is complicated and can’t happen overnight. However we are optimistic that we can create innovative solutions by applying the same dedication to environmental and social responsibility that we apply to product performance.

Where do you see this going in the next 5 years?
I think more outdoor companies will adopt the Higg Index and we’ll see it expand to other industries. As this happens, collaboration within and between industries should also expand. Addressing the impacts of products through their entire lifecycle is complicated, and no one is an expert at everything; a collaborative model will allow us to move faster.

In the past, paying a lot of attention to environmental and social responsibility was a progressive concept. Now it is a requirement for operating and doing business. Customer demand, climate change and regulation are already affecting business decisions and their influence will only become more prevalent. Over next few years, resources will diminish and we won’t be able to operate in the same way. Things will happen quickly so companies need to be thinking about radical innovation now. We will do things that were thought to be impossible because we don’t have a choice. Ignoring these issues is not an option.

About The North Face®   
The North Face, a division of VF Outdoor, Inc., is the world’s leading outdoor brand. Headquartered in Alameda, California, The North Face creates and distributes athlete-tested, expedition proven products that help people explore the world and test the limits of human potential. The North Face products are guaranteed for life and available in specialty mountaineering, backpacking, running, and snowsport retailers, premium-sporting goods retailers and major outdoor specialty retail chains around the world. For more information on The North Face, please visit www.thenorthface.com.

Bio: Adam Mott oversees the Corporate Sustainability program at The North Face. In his role, Adam develops and integrates The North Face sustainability strategy across the business, focusing on the development of environmentally responsible products, greenhouse gas emission management and reduction, community engagement and the elimination of operational waste.

Sustainability is becoming impossible to ignore in the outdoor industry. In this series, Breaking Trail, we look to our industry leaders for guidance, inspiration, and best practices in sustainable business in the outdoor-product space. Here, Walden Hyde speaks with Judy Amabile, president and co-founder of Product Architects Inc./ Polar Bottle about the holistic approach to sustainability and the tough decisions a small business needs to make when balancing sustainability and profit.

Judy Amabile, President and Co-founder of Product Architects Inc./ Polar Bottle

What is your philosophy about sustainability?
Sustainability involves making a shift in the way you think about what you do. It makes you ask questions like, “How many resources am I using up? What impact do my actions have on other people?”

Everybody is focused on making money right now, but I think it’s important to take the long view. As customers, we all need to move towards buying for quality and paying for it appropriately. Everything has a cost. When companies cut corners to make cheap products, it hurts people and the planet.

I think this really shows up in the case of globalization. There are consequences to the planet and worker safety when companies choose to manufacture in factories that pay substandard wages and operate in countries that don’t have strong pollution regulations. We need to have a broader prospective.

How does this show up in your business? What are you doing that’s exceptionally important?
We’re interested in making a good product that is useful and lasts, and we don’t try to go after every dime in every transaction. Because we’re privately owned, we can choose to make these decisions without worrying about what investors would think.

Our BPA-free bottles are made in our facility in Boulder, Colorado, from locally sourced materials. This saves on the environmental cost of transportation. We design our bottles so that they last, and we hope people hang onto them for years. So if a customer ever breaks or loses a cap, we’ll send a new cap for free so that the bottle can still be used. And because we have such trust in the quality of our products, if one of our bottles ever leaks or is dysfunctional, we’ll replace it for free.

We’ve chosen to pay our employees a living wage —it’s unsustainable to not pay people a living wage. After two weeks on the job, our workers receive $12/hour and we cover our employees’ basic health insurance premiums. It might not be the most profit-centered decision, but it’s worth it. It’s hard to be a good employee if you can’t go to the doctor when you are sick.

A company needs to make money, but we can’t be too short-sighted about the impact of our business.

What motivates you to do this?
Robert [Heiberger] and I both came out of corporate America and decided that we wanted to run our company differently. . .we had the luxury of thinking about how to build integrity into the core of our business. We’ve also become more aware over the years.

What’s keeping you from doing more?
We need to balance what we want to do with what we can do while still staying competitive. We have to compete, so sometimes that requires us to accept lower profit margins. We have to make sure that we are meeting the needs of our customers. For instance, some customers want every bottle to be packaged in its own plastic bag, and others request that the shipments of bottles that we send to their warehouses be broken into smaller boxes so that they can send them to individual stores. These packing materials may seem excessive, but we need to make sure that we accommodate our customers’ needs.

Where would you like this to go in the next five years?
The outdoor industry should be a leader in holistic approach to sustainability—it’s both an environmental and human issue.

There should be more incentive for manufacturing in the US or wherever our end-users are. When companies do manufacture abroad, it should be centered around expertise instead of exploitation.
We all need to consider how to do business in a way that’s better for the planet and for people. That’s the way our industry needs to go.
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About Product Architects Inc./Polar Bottle
Since 1994 Product Architects Inc./ Polar Bottle™ has manufactured and distributed the original insulated water bottles. The family-run company started out of a Boulder, Colorado garage with the Polar Bottle Sport™ — the first insulated water bottle on the market. At that time it had only one employee. Still based in Boulder, the company today employs close to 50 people and has expanded its product line with innovative insulated bottle designs, including the Polar Bottle Ergo™ and Polar Bottle Thermaluxe™.

About Judy Amabile
Judy Amabile is the President and Co-founder of Product Architects Inc./ Polar Bottle. When the company started, she personally traveled around Colorado selling the sport bottles to local bike shops. Since then, she has kept an active role in the company, helping oversee everything from accounting and finance to sales, marketing and production.

Judy is committed to family, sustainability and responsible business.  She is careful to source materials whenever possible from the United States and works hard to ensure she partners with environmentally conscious, ethical companies. Judy lives in Boulder with her dog and three sons. In her free time, she enjoys hiking, biking, skiing, traveling and spending time with her siblings, nieces and nephews (most of whom have at one point been employed at her company).