The Tamesis
Last month, Tapestry, the parent company of Coach and Kate Spade, signed a 10-year partnership with Swiss carbon removal startup Climeworks.
This is a bold move. The decade-long partnership is the kind of long-term support most climate solutions can only dream of. Sustainability is an increasingly contentious topic for American businesses. The Trump administration is conducting a systemic attack on climate action, rewriting and deleting critical climate databases, slashing funding for scientific research, and creating a culture of fear for companies openly committed to the cause.
“This is an opportunity for us to build long-term partnerships and signal to the market that this type of innovation is needed,” Logan Duran, Tapestry’s global head of ESG and sustainability, said in an interview. Fashion business. “There are going to be emissions problems that we can’t solve, and we need reliable, long-term, durable carbon removal solutions to address them.”
There are several reasons this isn’t a panacea: The partnership aims to offset Tapestry’s Scope 1 emissions, but most of the fashion industry’s emissions fall into Scope 3. Likewise, carbon removal is an emerging and relatively controversial method of offsetting carbon emissions, with carbon offsetting itself often considered a last resort.
But it’s still a rare development for an American fashion company in the current environment. He explained that Tapestry was able to make such an investment because Duran and his team doubled down on the business case for sustainability. It’s a complex process and every brand seems to have a different approach. Tapestry is focused on figuring out how to quantify climate risk, raising the costs of inaction (the subject of a recent report by the Apparel Impact Institute), and positioning sustainability at the heart of current and future business resilience. This is what they do.
The Tapestry Foundation has entered into a $3 million, multi-year partnership with the World Wildlife Fund (WWF) to promote more sustainable leather production and biodiversity conservation. This includes projects that prevent deforestation, restore degraded landscapes and create sustainable livelihoods for local communities, addressing key climate risks identified in scenario analyses.Photo: Silas Ismael/WWF Brazil
Mapping climate risks
In 2022, Duran’s team completed its first climate risk scenario analysis — the technical name for a dynamic process designed to help Tapestry understand how climate change will impact the development of its business. This is a multi-year work in progress and its accuracy continues to change over time.
For the second iteration, which is due to be completed in late 2025, Duran’s team is focusing on two different types of risk: physical risk and transformation risk. “Physical risks are generally simpler,” he explains. “We have identified approximately 250 locations across the organization, from corporate offices and retail stores to Tier 1 and Tier 2 fulfillment centers and suppliers. We are looking at potential risks such as flooding, drought and extreme heat, and the impact these issues may have on the organization in the long term.”
