The Mills Fabrica, a global platform for sustainable and social innovation has announced its opening plans for a new physical hub in the UK this Summer

This week, Swedish outdoor clothing brand Houdini has made what it refers to as its “Mono Air recipe” available as open source, encouraging other fashion companies to use it to “get creative, remake, rethink, go fully circular and think holistically”.

Yesterday, the H&M Foundation announced the winners of its 2020 Global Change Award, an annual award established in 2015 to promote sustainability and circularity in the fashion industry. Referred to as the “Nobel Prize of Fashion”, the GCA identifies and catalyses early stage innovations with the potential to redefine the industry and contribute towards creating a sustainable fashion future.

Well done to H&M group for appointing Helena Helmersson as CEO! Anyone who has followed her career achievements will agree that this decision is a no-brainer: As head of Sustainability at H&M she implemented ground-breaking and award-winning initiatives to integrate sustainability into the H&M business, paving the way for other brands to follow suit.

The sustainability challenges faced by the fashion industry are well-documented: Industrial textile waste, Post-consumer textile and packaging waste disposal, Ocean plastic waste, Microplastics, Fibre shedding, Recycling limitations and Non-renewable resource dependency are key among them.

The State of Fashion 2020 report published this week by McKinsey & Co in partnership with Business of Fashion, predicts fashion industry growth of just 3-4% in 2020 amid slowing global economic growth and continued uncertainty.

In light of this rather gloomy outlook, the report suggests that “successful companies will be the ones that ….. work out how to improve productivity while ensuring operational and financial flexibility”.

Its survey of 290 global fashion executives highlighted sustainability and digitization as key challenges that also represent sizeable opportunities.  So where does this leave small and mid-sized companies for whom investment in comprehensive digital solutions and larger-scale R&D activities is not an option?