Engaging the Market to Drive Impact in the Field: Q&A with Kmart Australia

Better Cotton brings people and businesses together across the cotton sector – to deliver a shared vision for the future of sustainable cotton. We focus primarily on supporting farmers on the ground. But it’s vital that we also drive demand for Better Cotton, in order to continue our growth and impact, firmly establishing Better Cotton as a viable commodity for farmers to grow and supporting them to improve their livelihoods.

In this blog series, we speak with three Better Cotton Retailer and Brand Members about the impressive progress they have made in their Better Cotton sourcing and how they are able to make advanced claims to their customers as a result. We’ll discuss how they communicate their Better Cotton progress with consumers in interesting and innovative ways. Third in the series is Kmart Australia. Since 2017, Kmart Australia has been a Retailer and Brand member of Better Cotton. The company operates over 200 stores across Australia and New Zealand.

Q&A with Lucy King, Sustainable Materials Manager, Kmart Australia

If you would prefer to listen to the audio of the Q&A, you can do so below.

In October 2020, Kmart – one of Australia’s largest retail brands, celebrated an important milestone with their customers since setting the ambitious goal of ‘100% more sustainably sourced cotton by July 2020’ back in 2017 as part of their Better Together sustainability program. Kmart launched it’s ‘100% sustainably sourced cotton’ brand campaign to celebrate that all of the cotton for Kmart’s own brand clothing, bedding and towels range is now sourced as Better Cotton, organic or recycled cotton. A significant amount of work was undertaken to ensure that Kmart had sufficient systems in place to measure and verify the progress made against its cotton commitment, and that all claims were credible and in line with Better Cotton’s Claims Framework and Australian Consumer Law, whilst keeping messaging simple and easy for customers to understand. Kmart had employed the use of the Better Cotton On-Product Mark, along with featuring cotton sustainability messaging in advertising, but to mark their 100% sustainably sourced cotton they developed a digital communications campaign to consumers.

Lucy, can you tell us a bit about Kmart’s cotton sourcing approach and your work with Better Cotton?

In 2017, Kmart set an ambitious commitment to source 100% of the cotton for our own brand clothing, bedding and towels ‘more sustainably’ by 2020, as part of our Better Together sustainability program. With partnerships playing a very important part of this program, we were one of the first Australian retailers to join Better Cotton and with strong leadership support, we set up a cross-functional project team to lead the rapid roll-out of Better Cotton across our global supply chain. In just three years, we managed to get all of our key cotton suppliers onboarded into the program and all of the cotton sourced for own brand clothing, bedding and towels range is now sourced as either Better Cotton, organic or recycled.

What have you learnt from when you began Kmart’s sustainability journey?

Transforming the way we work and source product as a large retailer is not easy and takes time. It involves working across multiple product categories, teams across six countries, and a global supply chain, but we’ve understood for some time that we have a responsibility to lead the way and with the right partners and level of leadership support, a clear project plan and the willingness of our teams and suppliers to do things differently, it is possible to drive meaningful impact. We still have a long way to go and the expectations from our stakeholders are only growing in this space, but we are committed to seeing this through and constantly evolving our approach to do better.

How did you arrive at your messaging for Kmart’s campaign?

Previously Kmart had done a lot of work in labelling cotton products with the Better Cotton logo and launching a TV Ad talking to our partnership with Better Cotton. This time around, as we were wanting to celebrate a significant milestone of achieving our ‘100% sustainably sourced cotton commitment’, we decided to go after an all encompassing ‘sustainably sourced cotton’ message as we felt this was a simple and easy message for the customer to grasp and it included all aspects of our sustainable cotton commitment – cotton sourced as Better Cotton (including Australian cotton), organic cotton as well as recycled cotton. Being a digital campaign comprised mostly of a video and social media assets, the messaging needed to be impactful, punchy and to the point, but the message also needed to be credible and water tight from a claims perspective. Given that the majority of our cotton has been sourced as Better Cotton and therefore via a mass balance system, we were careful to ensure that we didn’t make any claims that would mislead our customers into thinking that the products themselves physically contain sustainable cotton.

What consideration did you give to making sure that the campaign featured credible and transparent claims?

A significant amount of work has been undertaken in collaboration with our IT and sourcing teams over the years to ensure that we have sufficient systems and processes in place to measure and verify the progress made against our cotton commitment. When it came to developing the campaign messaging itself, we worked hard to find the right balance between developing bold, succinct and simple claims that are easy for customers to understand and suitable for digital assets such as video and social media content; yet ensuring that they were credible, in line with the Better Cotton Claims Framework and Australian Consumer Law. The sustainability and legal teams, as well as the Better Cotton team, were involved in every step of the process, providing guidance to our marketing team and agency along the way.

How important was it to bring the farmer voice, through Cotton Australia, into the campaign?

It was important to bring both the visuals of real-life cotton farms and the farmer voice, represented by our industry partner – Cotton Australia, into this campaign. Having their voice included in the campaign added credibility and provided a tangible illustration of what ‘sustainably sourced cotton’ means in practice. In this case, we were able to demonstrate that we are investing in and supporting the top 20% of growers in Australia who working and third-party audited to best practice farming standards.

What, in your experience, is the reception of customers to Better Cotton messaging like, and how has this evolved over time?

The campaign was received well by our customers who perceived the campaign to share new and different information, and indicated that they are hungry to learn more about what Kmart is doing in other areas of the business when it comes to sustainability. We can see through our ongoing customer research that customers awareness of Better Cotton and their recent purchases has grown over time – an indication that the Better Cotton labelling on cotton product in-store and online over the past two to three years is really starting to cut through. Our customer research also shows that a growing number of customers associate Better Cotton labelling with product that supports the future of workers in the cotton industry. This shows us that customers are starting to make the link between our investment in Better Cotton and the impact this has on the lives of cotton farmers both here in Australia and abroad.

Q&A with Björn Borg

Q&A with George at Asda

Better Cotton brings people and businesses together across the cotton sector – to deliver a shared vision for the future of sustainable cotton. We focus primarily on supporting farmers on the ground. But it’s vital that we also drive demand for Better Cotton, in order to continue our growth and impact, firmly establishing Better Cotton as a viable commodity for farmers to grow and supporting them to improve their livelihoods.

In this blog series, we speak with three Better Cotton Retailer and Brand Members about the impressive progress they have made in their Better Cotton sourcing and how they are able to make advanced claims to their customers as a result. We’ll discuss how they communicate their Better Cotton progress with consumers in interesting and innovative ways. Second up in the series is George at Asda. Asda is one of the UK’s largest supermarket chains, and its clothing range, George was launched in 1990 – the first supermarket clothing brand in Britain.

Q&A with Jade Snart, Senior Sustainability Manager, George at Asda

If you would prefer to listen to the audio of the Q&A, you can do so below.

The company states that its George clothes are sold in over 560 stores and its online business serves over 800,000 people per week. As part of its ‘George for Good’ campaign, George at Asda has made a commitment to source 100% more sustainable cotton for their own-brand clothing and soft home textile products. They state that they are working with their suppliers to source more sustainable cotton through Better Cotton. In October 2020, the company launched a new sustainability-focused store in Middleton, UK. As well as offering refill stations for other products such as tea and pasta, recycling options, and second-hand clothing options, the store featured messaging about George at Asda’s Better Cotton sourcing commitments. On digital screens above the clothing racks, customers were able to see videos of Better Cotton farmers, while information boxes next to the clothes rack also provided more information on the company’s cotton sourcing approach.

Jade, can you tell us more about your approach to sustainability within George at Asda?

Sustainability has become business as usual for us at George, we set our ‘George for Good’ strategy back in 2018 and it is now part of everyone’s KPI’s to deliver it. Our trading teams have targets to meet in terms of meeting our public commitments on responsibly sourced fibres, and I am pleased to say that over 80% of our shop floor now uses responsibly sourced fibres. For us however, it is more than just the fibres we source, it’s how our products are produced and packaged, what happens to them at the end of life and what impact that might have on the environment. We work with a number of partners to help us deliver our strategy and Better Cotton has become an integral part of everyday sourcing for us.

You’re a relatively new sustainability team and have made a lot of progress in a short period of time. Can you tell us about the challenges you foresaw and how you overcame them to reach the point you’re at today?

The biggest challenge for us was the education piece, it was so important that our colleagues and suppliers understood why we have set the strategy that we have and why playing their part is so important to help us along the way. In the early days we spend time with all of our colleagues and suppliers, including colleagues outside of the trading functions as we believe that if we are to become a truly sustainable business, we need everyone to be on the bus with us too.

Commercially we have come across a few challenges with switching to responsibly sourced fibres along the way, but we took this in bitesize chunks to enable us to move forward with our strategy but without having to pass any of the cost onto our customers. The current focus for us is now moving on to educating our customers to understand what steps we are taking, why we are taking them and how they can also make small changes in their day to day lives that can make a huge difference collectively.

In 2020, you launched your first sustainability store, in Middleton, UK. Can you explain how Better Cotton featured within this store in your communications with customers?

Yes, that’s right, we launched our first ever sustainability store back in October last year, the store was a fabulous opportunity for us to showcase all the work we had been doing in the background but hadn’t been able to share with our customers before. We wanted to use the platform to talk about what responsibly sourced fibres really means and it was important for us to take it as far back as the field where possible. We used story telling boxes and videos of Better Cotton farmers in the field on our digital screens, this was a first for us and the feedback has been brilliant.

Why did you set this store up, and how was this received?

We recognised as a business that we didn’t do a very good job of telling customers about all the great initiatives we had been working on and driving through our business. Setting up this store gave us a platform to test different forms of communication, test new initiatives and really listen to what resonates with our customers the most. From a George perspective, customers and colleagues were really intrigued with the storytelling boxes and were keen to learn more. We spent time with our colleagues in store, sharing our strategy and educating them to enable them to be our ‘in store experts’, the feedback we received from them was phenomenal, they love being able to explain to customers what it was all about and why we are doing what we are doing.

Do you have any specific consumer insights regarding your Better Cotton information in the store and your communications?

The main feedback we received was via our colleagues who had been asked questions firsthand by customers in store. They said that was the first time they have been inundated with questions relating to anything other than product. Lots of customers wanted to understand more about Better Cotton and what it was all about and I truly believe that having the story telling boxes and the digitals screens really prompted customers to want to learn more.

You use digital screens to show footage of Better Cotton Farmers in store. Why was this important?

For us, it’s always been more than just on product marks, and we wanted to use this store to educate our customers more about what responsibly sourced fibres really means and how sourcing in this way not only has a positive impact on the environment but what it means to the farmers in the fields too.

What comes next?

We have taken some huge learnings from the Middleton store and still continue to do so. As a result of the trials in that store, we now have a constant ‘drumbeat’ of storytelling across our stores, this has been mainly executed on our digital screens within our stores and we continue to look at other ways that we can bring our customers along on this journey with us.

Learn more about George at Asda.

Q&A with Kmart

COMING SOON

Q&A with Björn Borg

Better Cotton brings people and businesses together across the cotton sector – to deliver a shared vision for the future of sustainable cotton. We focus primarily on supporting farmers on the ground. But it’s vital that we also drive demand for Better Cotton, in order to continue our growth and impact, firmly establishing Better Cotton as a viable commodity for farmers to grow and supporting them to improve their livelihoods.

In this blog series, we speak with three Better Cotton Retailer and Brand Members about the impressive progress they have made in their Better Cotton sourcing and how they are able to make advanced claims to their customers as a result. We’ll discuss how they communicate their Better Cotton progress with consumers in interesting and innovative ways. First in the series is Björn Borg, a Swedish sportswear company named after the legendary tennis player.

.

Q&A with Pernilla Johansson, Corporate Communications Manager, Björn Borg

If you would prefer to listen to the audio of the Q&A, you can do so below.

Björn Borg’s first collection was sold in 1984, and today its products are sold in around twenty markets, with their biggest being Sweden and the Netherlands. The company joined Better Cotton as a Retailer and Brand member at the start of 2017 and has made a commitment to comply with the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals and to follow the pathway towards limiting global heating to 1.5 degrees Celsius.

Björn Borg’s sustainability communications speak openly and honestly about the challenges of sustainable sourcing. In particular, the company emphasises the notion that the company can always do more to improve. By 2023, the company aims to have “100% Sustainable products within sports apparel and underwear”. In its latest sustainability report, Bjorn Borg states that “A majority of our clothing is classified by us as sustainably sourced through the usage of recycled polyester and recycled polyamide and the support of Better Cotton.”

Pernilla, can you tell us a little about Björn Borg’s approach to sustainability?

We approach our sustainability work in the same way as we do with everything else – full speed ahead! In 2015, we concluded that running a more sustainable business is the only way forward – both for the planet, for people, and for the company to survive. We always set high goals, no matter what we do, and this is no exception. We want to do better and be better at as fast a speed as possible.

You reached your 2023 sustainability goals in 2020, earlier than planned. Can you talk about that journey and how Better Cotton played a part?

Well, we reached one of our goals which was to offer a clothing range where all products were sustainably classified. Since a product can’t ever be sustainable no matter how you twist and turn, we had to settle at getting better than before. Preferably better than most. Since there wasn’t any official standard back then, and still isn’t, we, just like many other fashion brands, landed in setting our own standard, a classification of how products would end up in our more sustainable range. We created our own label, which we called ‘B. Tomorrow’, and to earn that label a product would need to either be made of a minimum of 70% more sustainable material or support the Better Cotton mission (to improve cotton farming globally). Since we offer a lot of cotton products in our clothing range, products supporting Better Cotton were, therefore, a big part of this range. Apart from that, we work with for instance recycled polyester and recycled polyamide, TENCEL™ Lyocell and S.Café® to name a few.

On your website, you talk about challenges in fashion and how ‘fashion is not sustainable, period.’ Can you tell us why you’re taking this approach to sustainability communications?

I think that honesty and transparency are extremely important and the only way to gain the trust of the consumers. To meet the Agenda 2030 goals, companies and governments will have to pull the biggest load, but you and I, ordinary consumers, have to contribute as well. Plus, businesses are made out of people, people are consumers – oftentimes the lines are blurry between the two. I don’t think it’s riskier to be open, rather the other way around. If we are to accomplish a better world for our children, we all have to join hands and change our behaviour. We want to inform and enable our followers to make better choices as well.

And what comes next for your sustainability goals?

We are just initiating the second step of our journey, which is to follow the UN 1.5° pathway and have signed up to decrease our emissions by 50% in absolute numbers by 2030. For a company with big growth ambitions, this is an ambitious goal, but we like challenges.

Could you tell us some more about your targets and how Better Cotton will play a part in this going forwards?

As a result of our membership in STICA (Swedish Textile Initiative for Climate Action) we have committed to follow the 1.5° pathway. Better Cotton plays a role, among other things, since our collaboration enables our customers to support better cotton farming practices. It is a way for us to enable others to make a better choice, and ultimately a contribution to the global 1.5 degree goal.

Hopefully it will also contribute to a better tomorrow. We support Better Cotton with a large part of our range today and as long as we feel that we can make a difference, we will continue to do so. For measurements it would make a big difference with traceability though, since Better Cotton counts as conventional cotton in emission calculations.

Learn more about Björn Borg.

Q&A with George at Asda

COMING SOON

Q&A with Kmart

COMING SOON