24 Mar The Product Miles Brands Cannot See Are the Ones Costing Them the Most
If a product has circled the globe three times before hitting a shelf, does the sustainability story behind it still hold up?
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Our mission is to remind you that change doesn’t need to be perfect, just possible!
Whether you are a sustainability advocate or sustainability specialist, we are here to support those that carry the real weight of change so sustainability moves from strategy to execution.
Today we’re covering:
- Why brands are structurally set up to miss the connection between product miles, margin, and carbon impact
- Why certifications like GRS create a false sense of progress and what sits behind that
- Why consumers are not connecting the dots either, and whose responsibility that actually is
Are you ready to build change?
CONTEXT
A garment certified with the Global Recycled Standard. Recycled fibres. Responsible sourcing. Tick. Tick. Tick. On paper, that product looks like a sustainability win. But here is the question nobody in the room is asking: where has it actually been?
If that garment was designed in London, yarn spun in China, fabric woven in Vietnam, cut and sewn in Bangladesh, then shipped to a warehouse in the Netherlands before landing on a UK shelf, the certifications on the label tell only a fraction of the story. The rest of the story is written in logistics costs, freight emissions, and lead times that nobody mapped before the brief was approved.
This is the gap at the heart of sustainable product development right now. Brands are investing in better materials, chasing certifications, and publishing sustainability commitments. But the organisation itself is not built to connect those decisions to what the supply chain route actually looks like, what it costs in carbon, and what it costs in cash. That is not an accident. It is the result of how brands have always been structured.
For decades, apparel businesses were built for speed and scale. Functions were separated to move faster. Design did design. Sourcing did sourcing. Finance did finance. That division of labour worked when the goal was volume. But sustainability does not sit inside one function. It runs across all of them simultaneously. And organisations built for speed and separation do not naturally accommodate that kind of thinking.
The result is a brand that can certify its materials and still have no internal process that connects those material decisions to the journey the product takes, the carbon that journey generates, or the margin that complexity quietly erodes. Nobody is ignoring the problem. The structure of the business is simply not designed to see it.
Life Cycle Assessment exists to make that full picture visible. But LCA lives in PDFs, strategy decks, and certification reports, not inside the design tools, PLM systems, or costing sheets where actual decisions are made every day. It is commissioned after the sourcing route is locked. It arrives when it is too late to change the brief. And so the connection between better materials and better outcomes never surfaces where it could actually shift something.
This is why sustainability stalls. Not because brands lack ambition. Because the architecture of the business is working against the very integration that sustainability requires.
FACTS and STATS
IMPACT FOR YOUR CLIENTS
When brands present new materials or design innovations to internal teams, the resistance is rarely about the solution itself. It is about how the organisation processes information. Design, sourcing, logistics, finance, and sustainability all operate from different KPIs, so a more sustainable material is evaluated as a cost line or a compliance task, never as a lever for gross margin, on-time delivery, or brand equity. The commercial teams are not in the same conversation. The connection cannot be made because the structure does not make space for it. McKinsey research shows that two in five apparel brands have seen their emissions intensity increase since making public sustainability commitments, with only 37% on track to reach their 2030 targets. That gap is not a failure of intention. It is a failure of integration inside the business.
YOUR ORGANISATION'S IMPACT
The supply chain is where the system’s fragmentation becomes most expensive. Air freight emits 20 to 30 times more CO2 per metric ton per kilometre than ocean shipping, yet it is increasingly common as brands compensate for planning gaps with faster, more expensive logistics. When a product is over-engineered, changes supplier late, or crosses multiple countries unnecessarily, the extra transport legs and buffer inventory erase the environmental gains of a greener material before anyone in the business has noticed. The sustainability team approved the material. The sourcing team approved the route. Nobody owned both decisions at once. That is not a people problem. It is an organisational design problem that keeps repeating at scale.
OPERATIONAL REALITY
Around 455 eco labels operate across 199 countries in the fashion industry. GRS, “recycled,” and “sustainable” appear so frequently that consumers treat them as marketing language rather than as a system connecting design, materials, logistics, and end of life. This is not simply consumer apathy. It reflects what brands are communicating, which is almost always what a product is made from, and almost never how far it travelled or why that matters. Carbon is an abstract metric. A few grams of CO2e are meaningless without context. But “this bag’s shipping emits more than its materials” is a story people can hold onto. Brands are not telling that story because the business is not set up to know it, let alone share it.
PROS and CONS
Pros
- Certifications create regulatory credibility: GRS and equivalent standards verify recycled content and chain of custody, which matters as EU due diligence requirements intensify. For brands that need to demonstrate supplier accountability, this foundation is worth having. The issue is not the certification itself. It is the assumption that certification is sufficient.
- Supply chain complexity is a visible cost lever: Unlike some sustainability improvements that require long lead times and high investment, reducing product miles has a direct and measurable impact on freight costs, lead times, and overproduction risk. When brands can see this clearly, the sustainability and commercial argument become exactly the same argument. That alignment is genuinely available. Most brands just have not built the internal view to see it yet.
- LCA contains commercially valuable intelligence: The data inside a life cycle assessment is not just an environmental report. It is a map of where cost and carbon are concentrating across the supply chain. Brands that integrate that intelligence into operational decisions rather than sustainability reports have a genuine advantage. The tool exists. The integration does not.
Cons
- Certifications create a finishing line where there is not one: When a brand achieves GRS certification, it signals progress. But a certified product can still carry a significant carbon footprint if the route is long, fragmented, or reliant on air freight. The label verifies the material. It says nothing about the miles. And inside most brands, nobody is tracking both together as a single picture.
- Functional separation makes systemic thinking structurally unlikely: Brands are not set up to see the supply chain as one connected system. Each function has its own data and its own definition of success. This is not resistance in the conventional sense. It is the predictable output of an organisational model built for a different era. The structure generates the blind spot. And the blind spot is expensive.
- Consumer confusion is a brand-level failure, not a consumer one: Label fatigue exists because the product narrative that reaches consumers is incomplete. When the brand does not know or communicate the full story of a product’s journey, consumers cannot make informed choices. That is not a consumer education problem. It is a transparency gap created by the way brands currently manage and share supply chain information.
SYSTEMS THINKING
The supply chain is not a pipeline. It is a system. Every decision made at brief stage, which material, which construction method, which supplier, sets off a chain of consequences that runs through logistics, cost, compliance, and eventually the story the consumer hears. But most brands are not organised to see that chain. They are organised to manage each part of it separately. And that separation is precisely what allows the losses to stay hidden.
This is the core structural problem. Sustainability cannot be housed in a single function because it is not a single function problem. It runs across design, sourcing, logistics, finance, and communications simultaneously. But when it sits in one team and its outputs are communicated in one language, to one audience, through one type of report, the rest of the business does not absorb it. The system keeps running the same way it always has because nobody is watching it as a whole.
What brands are currently experiencing is the predictable output of that architecture. LCA findings arrive after decisions are made. Material improvements are cancelled out by logistics choices made in a separate room. Certifications are pursued because they are legible and auditable, not because they address the system. And the consumer story stalls at the label because the brand itself does not have an integrated picture to communicate.
The insight that changes this is not a new tool or a new framework. It is recognising that the problem is not located inside any one team. It is located in the space between teams, in the handoffs, the gaps, and the decisions made without shared visibility. Scope 3 emissions do not belong to the sustainability team. They are the output of sourcing decisions, logistics decisions, and product decisions made across the whole business. Treating them as a sustainability task is what keeps them unmanageable.
When brands start to map these connections across functions, something important becomes visible. Reducing product miles is not just an environmental decision. It shortens lead times, which reduces buffer stock, which reduces overproduction, which reduces waste and unsold inventory sitting in a warehouse eroding margin. Those outcomes matter to different functions for entirely different reasons. But they all flow from the same upstream decision about how the supply chain is designed. The system is already there. Most brands just have not built the internal view to see it operating as one thing.
That is the real opportunity. Not to add more sustainability initiatives to a business already running at capacity. But to make the existing system legible enough that the decisions being made inside it start to account for the full picture.
NEXT STEPS
- Audit where LCA data currently sits and who it reaches. Most brands have more life cycle intelligence than they are using. The question is whether it is living in a report or in a decision. Map the journey from LCA finding to operational change and identify where it breaks down. That break point is where the integration work needs to start.
- Identify which functions are making decisions that affect Scope 3 without knowing it. Sourcing, logistics, planning, and product teams are generating carbon and cost consequences every day without a shared view of the impact. Before any new initiative, map which decisions are creating the most exposure and whether the people making those decisions have the information they need to see it.
- Change what the product story communicates, starting internally. If the brand cannot tell a complete story about a product’s journey inside the business, it cannot tell that story to consumers either. Building the internal narrative first, one that connects material choice, supply chain route, carbon impact, and cost, creates the foundation for the external one. That is not a communications task. It is an organisational one.
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Cited sources:
- Apparel Impact Institute. Taking Stock of Progress Against the Roadmap to Net Zero. 2025
- McKinsey & Company. Decarbonisation in the Apparel Sector. 2024
- OECD. The Role of Sustainability Certifications in Due Diligence in the Garment and Footwear Sector. 2025
- Good On You. Fashion’s Carbon Footprint and International Shipping. 2024
- Traxtech. Fashion Supply Chains Drive 7.5% Emissions Spike as Fast Fashion Scales Production. 2025
- Stand.earth. Fossil Free Fashion Scorecard. 2025
