Next week, business leaders will gather at Hampton Court Palace in England for the Sustainable Markets Initiative’s (SMI) annual Spring Summit. It’s not exclusive to fashion, but fashion will be well represented — the SMI counts Giorgio Armani, Brunello Cucinelli, and Prada among its members. SMI founder His Majesty King Charles III will be there in support, as will the SMI’s new ambassador Stella McCartney, who was welcomed into the fold at London Fashion Week last month, and Yoox founder Federico Marchetti, who leads the SMI’s Fashion Task Force.
Ahead of the Summit, the SMI finds itself at a critical junction. Six years into a 10-year mandate, the nonprofit is pivoting its strategy, hoping to accelerate climate action before it’s too late. Its emphasis on shifting mindsets will be supplemented with a bid to scale direct impact. And, in service of this, its industry-specific working groups will be retired in favor of industry-agnostic “pathfinders”, designed to rally different industries to work together on issues that affect them all, including decarbonization, shipping, artificial intelligence, and growth capital. The shift reflects broader industry rumblings — that change is not happening fast enough, that policymakers might not push the progressive change they promised, and that the private sector will have to step up to maintain momentum. But can the SMI’s specific brand of ‘gently does it’ private sector diplomacy deliver?
CEO Jennifer Jordan-Saifi believes she is well-placed to try. Jordan-Saifi spent the first decade of her career providing humanitarian aid in conflict zones in the Middle East, and the decade after that negotiating the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) on behalf of the Canadian government. Diplomacy comes second nature to her. These days, she uses it to convince private sector CEOs to act on climate reform.
Her main priority is to bridge the gap between under-resourced governments with fast-approaching climate targets and private-sector leaders with money to spend. “To achieve the SDGs and the Paris Climate Agreement by 2030, we need to move from billions of dollars in investment to trillions,” she explains. “Most governments don’t have the resources to do this, which is why we’re falling short of those goals. We need the private sector to come on board.”
The SMI’s founding mission was to form a de facto “United Nations for the private sector” that would identify scalable climate solutions, convince private sector leaders of their value and viability, and help those leaders to overcome barriers together, says Jordan-Saifi, who has been part of the organisation since its foundation in 2020, in her previous capacity as private secretary to the then-Prince of Wales. When His Majesty ascended to the throne in 2022, Jordan-Saifi took on the mantle of CEO, and he graduated to “the wise man on the mountain”, she says — still supportive of the SMI, but “at arm’s length”, in deference to his new constitutional responsibilities.
Her mandate to 2030 was clearly laid out in the organisation’s 2021 Terra Carta manifesto. Inspired by the Magna Carta, the Terra Carta is “a private sector roadmap that puts nature, people, and planet at the heart of global value creation”. Its 10 principles include: accelerate and align industry roadmaps, adopt common metrics and standards, sustainable investing at scale, and create market incentives. The SMI also has a secondary manifesto, the Astra Carta, which was published in 2023, to “protect our origins on Earth” as the space race heats up. If the SMI is the private sector’s answer to the UN, these are its resolutions, she says: “It’s really about transforming business models and economic models to be default sustainable.”
The move towards cross-industry pathfinders is “a maturity thing”, says Jordan-Saifi. “When we started, we grouped companies by industry because many of them hadn’t thought about sustainability before. We needed to get everyone moving in the same direction of travel, even if they were moving at different paces. Now, to deliver on that, we need a more horizontal approach. We have always acknowledged that change won’t come from one company alone; now we’re saying it won’t come from one industry alone.”
Educate and elevate
The SMI’s main goal is to “bring leaders in and make them feel safe to learn”, says Jordan-Saifi. It’s a process of “continuous improvement”, while acknowledging that “nobody is going to be perfect overnight”. In service of this, the organization stages a lot of “seeing is believing” interventions, highlighting the power of field trips to see case studies in action and catalyze mindset shifts.
It can be difficult to quantify the impact of a soft approach that relies so heavily on intangible metrics such as mindset shifts and emotional resonance. In the SMI’s recent impact report, which charts its first five years, the Fashion Task Force offers several somewhat piecemeal examples of its progress. There is the Armani Group’s bid to grow regenerative cotton in Italy, which has yielded a small, experimental run of around 1,000 T-shirts. Then there’s the Himalayan Regenerative Fashion Living Lab, which supports local communities in Ladakh, India, in transitioning to regenerative practices, and has resulted in a 200kg pilot run of regenerative pashmina making its way into Brunello Cucinelli products.
Other projects focus on sharing and scaling best practices and accelerating change. Some of these changes might have happened with or without the SMI, says Jordan-Saifi, pointing to its work on Digital Product Passports (DPPs), which includes Chloé, Brunello Cucinelli, Giorgio Armani, Gabriela Hearst, Dries Van Noten (Puig Group), Prada, and Miu Miu. But the SMI says it has been instrumental in encouraging private-sector leaders to act first, building critical infrastructure with plenty of time to comply with incoming regulations, rather than waiting, as many in the fashion industry who did now face a supply chain bottleneck. “With the EU regulations coming in, more and more companies are doing this anyway, but I think we were one of the first to really promote it among luxury brands,” she says.
Like many convening organizations, the SMI struggles to quantify its impact. Many of the successes it claims are indirect, carried out by its members — who may or may not have been influenced by the SMI — but not directly managed by the non-profit. Take Stella McCartney’s continued support of emerging material innovations, for example, or Pandora’s switch to recycled gold and silver. Likewise, in Spain, major fashion retailers including H&M, Zara, Mango, Decathlon, and Primark are participating in a one-year trial textile waste collection programme dubbed Re-Viste, which aims to improve waste management and recycling rates. “Attribution is always a challenge,” says Jordan-Saifi. “Ultimately, we’re a peer-to-peer network trying to drive change at the systems level so all actors benefit and contribute. It’s a hard thing to pin down, but we have to keep elevating these examples so that big companies realise what is possible. What I’m looking for is more people to elevate.”
This is also where the ambassadors come in. Alongside McCartney, the SMI has appointed seven astronauts as ambassadors and has a slew of sports stars still under wraps. The aim is to “inspire change” and bring the SMI’s message to a broader audience, especially where subjects can get complex and “dry”, says Jordan-Saifi. On the fashion side, McCartney tells Vogue Business that her priorities are accelerating the adoption of lower-impact materials, supporting supplier transformation, and proving that decarbonization is possible when the full value chain works together. “What makes the SMI different is that it is not about conversations for the sake of it. It brings together CEOs, policymakers, finance and industry leaders to focus on delivery — making it possible for responsible choices to become commercially viable at scale,” she notes.
Pushing past the headwinds
Getting CEOs to see the value in sustainability is one thing, but getting them to implement it at scale is another challenge entirely. “At the end of the day, when it impacts the bottom line, and consumers become much more demanding of sustainable alternatives, then CEOs will take even more notice,” says Jordan-Saifi. “A lot of it is about education, and getting CEOs to care enough about the topic to make the changes required. It’s important to show them how sustainability can still be profitable and allow for economic growth.”
For fashion, the SMI is focused on rallying CEOs to scale regenerative agriculture, making DPPs universal, and making these changes desirable to consumers, says Marchetti. “The biggest challenges are scale, alignment, and storytelling. Scale is difficult because regenerative agriculture and traceability require transforming entire supply chains. Alignment is complex because fashion is fragmented. And storytelling matters because consumers must understand why regeneration and transparency are valuable. If customers reward responsible products, transformation accelerates,” he adds. “I am optimistic because fashion has always been an industry of creativity and reinvention. With collaboration and innovation, we can turn sustainability into the next great chapter of luxury.”
The SMI was founded in 2020, and was in its infancy when the Covid-19 pandemic struck, pushing sustainability down the agenda as more urgent matters took hold. Shortly after, the war in Ukraine shifted energy priorities, the first in what became a continuous stream of economic and geopolitical challenges. Throughout, the SMI has had to compete with other strategic priorities, says Jordan-Saifi. “The global context has not been easy since we started. The headwinds have been strong, but we can’t just wait for the headwinds to stop blowing, or we’ll never get anywhere. It’s super important that we maintain momentum and recognize the long-term importance of this transition.”
This is where diplomacy — the SMI playbook — comes in clutch. Once the SMI gets private sector CEOs to align on a transition trajectory, it identifies common barriers and takes them back to governments to try and find solutions. “We can go back to governments and say: we’ve got the finance, insurance, and energy companies ready to help you with your renewable energy targets, but they need better permitting systems to do it. There’s no way these projects will be realised by 2030 if permitting takes seven to 10 years. How can we help you — the government — get this done?” explains Jordan-Saifi. “If you want good partnerships between governments and the private sector, you need to find win-win solutions.”
Jordan-Saifi says she is cautiously optimistic. “Do I think we are going to achieve everything we want to by 2030? Probably not,” she explains. “But we have to maintain the highest level of ambition to achieve the maximum we can. Sometimes the private sector is seen as the enemy, but if we can turn them into agents of change, we can actually achieve our goals.”
