This episode is sponsored by Coats Digital:
The Interline Podcast continues, with our second full-length episode – The Data-Driven Supply Chain – available across all major listening platforms from today. This episode dives into the various ways that supply chain data can transform how the fashion industry thinks about efficiency, risk management, and both the environmental and ethical components of sustainability.
This month, our Editor-in-Chief, Ben Hanson welcomes three guests: Stuart McCready-Stocks, Commercial Director for brands at Coats Digital; Mark Dodds, Materials, Lifecycle & Impact Manager at L’Estrange London; and Sharon Benning-Prince, COO of Justice In Fashion.
Listen now:
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New full-length episodes continue to be released monthly, with Episode 3: Championing Change scheduled for early April. Our condensed episodes (“The Interline Podcast Distilled“) pack all the key insights from our full-length shows into half the time; the Distilled version of this episode will be released in mid-March.
In the meantime, you can find key talking points from Episode 2 of The Interline Podcast below.
Key talking points:
- Risk is currently everywhere, making supply chain resilience essential for the parties on both ends: brands and their multi-tier suppliers. But as the world begins to move on from COVID, only for war to follow in its wake, how much does fashion really know about how risk-proof and sustainable its supply chains really are?
- As much as improvements to materials, cost, quality, waste and other key sustainability metrics matter on a per-product basis, before fashion focuses exclusively on these, should the industry be reconsidering whether all those products actually need to be brought to market in the first place?
- COVID kicked off a humanitarian crisis in the textile and apparel manufacturing sector – one that the industry seems poorly-equipped to assess the lasting impact of. That must change, but how?
- Measuring the impact of a particular product, or collection, involves collecting supply chain data across a range of variables – from raw material harvesting to packaging. If fashion is going to move towards climate positivity, what are the non-negotiable things the industry has to be able to prove?
- The question of what supply chain data matters is not just a case of collecting new data sources, but surfacing the right insights from that data. What does it mean for a brand to be present in the supply chain, but also able to make objective, informed decisions about how to reshape it?
- How can the fashion industry make the biggest strides, in the shortest time, towards elevating people to their rightful place at the heart of the sustainability conversation – the equal of planet and performance?
- How can brands prepare to communicate their supply chain data to both in-house stakeholders and the growing audience of educated consumers?
- What does a future proof supply chain – one built on a foundation of supply chain data – truly look like?
This episode contains answers to all these questions. But don’t forget to follow The Interline Podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or your platform of choice to be notified when future episodes – on a range of different fashion technology themes – go live.