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Steady in the storm: navigating change and growth in 2024

With the end of 2024 approaching, we took some time to reflect on a year marked by both progress and complexity in the pursuit of sustainable innovation. It has been a pivotal year for Fashion for Good, defined by deeper collaborations with brands, suppliers, and investors to accelerate the scaling of innovations. Here are some reflections from our unique point as a global convener and catalyst for change in the fashion industry.

Credit: Bengamin Farren (via Pexels)

 

4 December 2024

2024 marked an ambitious shift in our efforts to advance industry-wide adoption of sustainable innovations. We intensified efforts in scaling through our Innovation Platform, fostering deeper and closer collaboration with brands, suppliers and investors. The evolution of our approach brought a renewed focus on key levers bringing effective action to scaling solutions, in particular: providing stronger bespoke support for leading innovations, launching Strategic Supplier initiatives to pull in suppliers, supporting brands with validation and integration of new technologies, and working closely with investors to catalyse capital.

2024 has also tested the resilience of many first movers, including Circulose and Natural Fiber Welding. As innovations always have, they navigated scaling and adoption challenges. These moments underscored an essential truth: innovation is seldom linear. It thrives on adaptation and the forging of new alliances to overcome systemic barriers. In a landscape that is constantly evolving, the work of driving sustainable innovation requires more than vision — it demands a readiness to navigate complexity collaboratively. As the challenges grow, so too does the urgency to act, fostering bold solutions that can reframe what is possible for the industry’s future.

Storms come and go, but our commitment to bring change across the whole industry remains unwavering. Below, we share our reflections on major milestones of 2024, marking a year of hard-fought progress:

FOOTWEAR INNOVATION STEPS UP

The innovations we support emerge from all corners of the industry, whether it’s entrepreneurs, industry incumbents or more mature organisations, we are constantly assessing the landscape, scouting & validating solutions. Footwear has historically lagged behind apparel in terms of material innovations, but industry demand for new solutions has been steadily increasing, making it an essential area of focus for innovators. As such, we’re excited about the launch of our Footwear Initiative, to scout, accelerate and validate the next generation of footwear innovations. This work addresses the key intervention points needed to drive footwear circularity.

2024 also brought a few of our validation projects to a close, identifying the most promising technologies in key focus areas, including:

Additionally, in 2024, nine innovators participated in the 2024 programme to receive tailored support validating their technologies. The cohort consisting of footwear material and recycling technologies, man-made cellulosic, and nylon recycling has graduated into our growing Alumni network.

INNOVATION TAKES OVER THE RUNWAY

We work with over 12% of the industry to scout, validate and scale new technologies. We know this work is never quick nor straightforward given the complexity of a highly fragmented industry. But this year, meaningful progress was made through targeted co-development enabling many of our partners to pull innovations through to products.

CLOSING THE DATA GAP

Bridging data gaps has proven essential to drive meaningful circularity efforts. In 2024, we intensified efforts to bridge data gaps and amplify suppliers’ contributions to innovation while supporting efforts to target improvements more effectively and demonstrate accountability.

  • Together with Textile Exchange, we introduced the Tracing Textile Waste Project to harmonise data and system capabilities in the reverse supply chain, seeking to create a standardised framework for collecting and exchanging textile waste data between the point of origin and recyclers.

  • We developed a new tool, World of Waste, a tool which maps global textile waste hotspots to provide transparent, aggregated regional data. The initiative addresses the lack of a central platform that aggregates textile waste data, a gap that limits access to crucial knowledge needed to harness the potential of this waste.

  • We launched our Sorting for Circularity USA report: a first of its kind in the US, covering consumer disposal behaviour, textile waste composition, and the potential for fibre-to-fibre recycling within the country. By addressing the challenge of 85% of textile waste ending up in landfills (due to insufficient infrastructure, data gaps, and limited access to recyclable feedstock), the report provides crucial insights for making informed decisions for further investments, infrastructure development and the next steps towards circularity.

  • Expanding our “Sorting for Circularity” framework, we kicked off the Rewear project to address the challenge of ensuring rewearable textiles remain in use as opposed to finding their way into global waste streams or landfills. Currently, manual sorting processes and insufficient data on rewearability hinder the efficient flow of textiles into circular systems. This project tests automated sorting technologies using AI to optimise the sorting of rewearable garments and enable greater circularity.

A SHARED WALLET FOR INNOVATION

As a small organisation with a large reach, we play a catalytic role through our early-stage investing and active investor network. Over the course of 2024, we made an additional 7 investments, bringing us to €4.6M EUR invested across 50 companies over the last 6 years.

Beyond direct investments, we work closely through our investor network to assess opportunities and unlock unconventional funding pathways (ex: Project Financing, blended capital stack, etc). We are happy to see that, despite a relatively challenging economic year (funding raised by Fashion for Good innovators down 60% vs the prior year to €326M), many of our innovators were able to secure the financing they need to scale:

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