Conversations: Bill Brewster, SVP/GM Retail Business Unit, PTC

Released in The Interline’s first Sustainability Report, this executive interview is one of a ten-part series that sees The Interline quiz executives from major companies on what the term ‘sustainability’ really means, as well as the integral role they play in supporting brands and retailers in their sustainability strategies.

For more on sustainability in fashion, download the full Sustainability Report 2023 completely free of charge and ungated.

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Do you believe “sustainability” is still a useful term for defining the complex road that fashion needs to travel? What does that word mean to you, and how does your definition manifest itself in your company’s approach to designing solutions for fashion’s most urgent challenge?

There is no easy way to capture the scale of the challenge that fashion retail is facing, but we do know the speed at which change needs to happen: as fast as possible. That means a wide spectrum of different metrics and yardsticks for progress, across environmental and social factors, that must all move in a positive, unified direction on an accelerated calendar.

Different organizations will prioritise different parts of that spectrum according to their maturity levels and strategic objectives. But at a whole-industry level, fashion and retail are very clearly moving towards a steep, measurable reduction in environmental impact, and more equal treatment of people up and downstream. And that’s happening faster than I think some parts of the industry were ready for. 

There are different labels for that movement that fit different audiences. Enterprise stakeholders and investors will speak about environmental & social governance (ESG) and corporate social responsibility (CSR). Retail partners, marketplaces, and consumers might use a more universal “sustainability” label. Regulators and state-level actors will talk in terms of due diligence, compliance, and disclosure.

These are all tools for defining and discussing different parts of the same common journey. And from PTC’s perspective, designing solutions that help brand and retail businesses to meet the needs of all those different audiences – and to improve the metrics that matter the most to them – means really understanding that journey. Not as a static target, but as a constantly evolving conversation between a world that demands change, and an industry that needs the solutions and the data and the support to deliver it.

We’re committed to building that understanding, and creating solutions that are equal to the challenge. We do that by, among other things, hosting a dedicated sustainability working group that’s made up of the most iconic and successful names in retail. That group meets regularly to share strategies, tools, tactics, and best practices – and we’re already seeing its members, with the help of the PTC technology they have been instrumental in shaping and driving real change.

PTC is also the only premiere partner of Worldly (formerly Higg). We collaborate with them on a technical level, which gives our teams tangible and unique insights from the organization that’s working hard to build out the mechanics of accountability and action in sustainability – and to make those learnings accessible to PTC’s massive user community.

Working with those definitions in mind, let’s zero in on the major enterprise CSR and ESG concerns. What are your customers asking for – and what do you think fashion brands need in general – to help deliver on the most urgent social and environmental initiatives?

We’ve seen a very clear shift from softer sustainability targets that brands, retailers, and suppliers set for themselves (such as the move towards renewable energy in production facilities, or the push for more recycled materials) to a focus on certification and compliance requirements. 

This is very rapidly changing both the scope and the speed of what our customers want and need from PTC solutions like FlexPLM. Because unlike internal targets (which tended to have longer timelines and softer penalties attached to them) external regulations are clearer in their requirements, much more urgent in their implementation, and far more likely to result in fines, reputational harm, and other methods of direct enforcement.

There is no question that compliance with legislation is top of our customers’ priorities – and top of the list for the industry as a whole. But another major factor at play is how quickly the legislative landscape is changing; after a period of debate and refinement, concrete regulations are now approaching adoption at speed, and with different structures and different strategies depending on what regions you design, develop, and source in – and what markets you sell to.

The AGEC law in France is a strong example. It is now a legal requirement for retailers of a certain size to provide product sheets that captures critical information: the percentage of recycled material the product contains, how recyclable it is, whether it contains any hazardous substances or plastic microfibers, and more. For a lot of organisations, that is information that exists – at best – in disconnected systems and folders, and it is information that might not meet the standards of objectivity and confidence for disclosure even if it is captured and centralized.

So, for a significant segment of the fashion retail industry, compliance with just one set of regulations is not just another box to be checked, but an exercise in collecting new (or better) data so that they can make attestations that are already becoming mandatory. 

It is important to remember that similar legislation – but with different reporting requirements – is being put on the books in other regions. And legislation is also progressive: it might be applicable to big enterprises only, at first, but in just a few years the same compliance requirements will extend to brand and retail businesses of every shape and size. So, there is a real and pressing need for solutions.

How is that cobweb of different rules and regulations at the local, regional, and global levels influencing what brands and retailers want from PLM and the technology ecosystem built around it?

Real enterprise PLM should be the central hub where material, supplier, and product data is mastered. The demand for that data is going to keep scaling upwards as the fashion and retail industry continues along this accelerated journey, and the solution that houses it needs to be robust, scalable, and agile so that fashion companies can respond to different regional reporting requirements – today and in the future.

Being the beating heart of the design, development, and sourcing ecosystem is something the best PLM solutions already do well. What is changing is the drive for PLM users to extend the footprint of the data they want to capture and consolidate in a single, secure, location both up and downstream. 

So, we foresee the biggest evolution being the expectation that PLM can serve as the single source of truth for not just product and material data, but proof of origin documentation, material provenance and composition data, circularity metrics, and other vital datapoints that need to be communicated to regulators and end consumers.

Where does that data live, in a typical brand’s technology stack, today? And what is the argument for moving it to PLM?

At the moment, key data that will be essential to due diligence and disclosure requirements tends to live in spreadsheets, emails, static PDFs, and other digital dead-ends. As a result, each individual sustainability initiative today must start with a lengthy, detailed, process of identifying where information resides, and how to consolidate it – and that’s a process that has to repeat, to some extent, for each new set of compliance and reporting requirements.

As fashion and retail move towards greater accountability and transparency, that is not a sustainable workflow. So, the answer, to me, seems clear: reliable, proven, enterprise-grade PLM should become the central hub for the data and the certificates, and the traceable communications needed for compliance.

This is the same process the fashion retail industry has already undergone for product data, bills of materials, supplier management, and a wide range of other critical information across the extended product lifecycle. This is also the role that FlexPLM has been stress-tested in, time and time again, by the leading names in fashion and retail, so we’re confident that our core platform is the right choice to support our customers in the near-term objective of consolidating and extracting value from their key sustainability data.

And when we look a little further into the future, the extended capabilities of the PTC Flex suite – like our Flex Insights platform- can start to build on top of that centralized data to serve up holistic analysis and actionable insights that will help take our customers’ environmental and social initiatives to the next stage.

It’s one thing to bring together product data and inspection certificates, but it’s another to share live information between brands and suppliers. If the future is going to be defined by real-time visibility and transparency, that seems like an essential distinction – not looking at software as a place to just put information, but as a channel of communication, collaboration, and accountability. Does that align with your vision?

It does, and this is an area where FlexPLM has been laying the groundwork for decades. At the time this report comes out, there will be more than 75,000 users of FlexPLM in the global supply chain. These are full user licences, governed by bulletproof security and role-based access to functionality and information – people in production facilities, sourcing offices, mills, and across the extended worldwide value chain who are interacting with live product data that is shared between them and their brand partners.

There is still work to do to ensure that these users – and their brand partners – are sharing the right data, with the right frameworks, to unlock compliance with current and future regulations, but the reality is that few, if any, other software vendors have that kind of reach and that level of adoption upstream. And that’s the foundation that the future of sustainability should be built on.

For a lot of fashion businesses, compliance with regional regulations is the priority target, but long-term sustainability is about individual and collective action to rapidly improve fashion’s environmental and ethical credentials. What do you think the future looks like at that whole-industry level? And what does that mean for your roadmap and your customers?

As I said earlier, sustainability in fashion and retail is only trending in one direction: towards traceability, transparency, disclosure, and industry-wide action. Sustainability is not a passing fad – it’s radically and rapidly redefining the future of the retail industry, and PTC has been preparing for some time to support our customers as they address one of the industry’s – and the world’s – biggest challenges.

We lead the retail PLM market in user numbers by a large margin. More than 300,000 people use FlexPLM every day as the home for their planning, product design, development, sourcing, and other mission-critical processes. We take that role seriously, and our retail team – most of whom come with decades of experience directly from RFA industry – are passionate about building out the capabilities that will define the role of digital transformation as an engine for sustainability.

But as powerful and widely-used as the platform itself is, we also recognise that we need to continue to build industry partnerships and integrations with more 3^rd party solutions. That is why we have already established a unique new partnership in environmental impact assessment – PTC is the only premiere partner of Made2Flow – and why our longstanding approach to openness and solution-agnostic integration is the right choice to making FlexPLM the core of a new technology ecosystem centred around measurable progress towards sustainability goals, and compliance with both current and emerging regulations.