Sustainability Isn’t Sustainable: The Word That Killed the Message
I hate "sustainability."
Wait, let me clarify.
I want to preserve the planet for my children and my children's children. I'm anti-waste, and I hate the systems of conspicuous consumption that have precipitated a mass climate crisis. I fear the catastrophic, unforeseen climate events that linger around the corner. I believe there are more important things than profit, and I recognize the responsibility we all carry working in an industry where the prevailing linear model of take, make, and dispose accelerates the crisis at a compounding rate.
But I hate the word sustainability.
I hate it because it has taken all the multi-faceted, nuanced, and diverse solutions to the apparel industry's woes and replaced them with one generic, vanilla, arguably meaningless term. If the word still carries any meaning, it's a loose association of "being good for the planet," all awash in green and beige.
Yet there are genius innovations by companies solving specific, tangible problems in the apparel industry's quest to turn the tide. Some are making recycling easier for the consumer. Others are creating ingenious materials from waste, building accountability systems for every finished good, or using AI to avoid overproduction and the jaw-dropping, stomach-turning levels of waste it creates.
They are so much more than just "sustainable," a word that has come to mean nothing and everything all at once. And using it in corporate messaging is the fastest way to sink these innovations into the great cotton-and-beige abyss.
The False Dichotomy of Sustainability Messaging
Most companies use a simple, effective framework to market their products:
challenging current "as-is" state / promising future state with said product
However, most companies that offer products, solutions, and services that help the Apparel industry minimize its impact set up the "as-is" state with a doomsday data-dump. How often have we heard:
"If fashion were a country, it would be the 5th most polluting country in the world."
"The industry disposes of 92 million tons of waste each year."
"The equivalent of one garbage truck of textiles is landfilled or burned every second."
And while those stats are scary, scary enough to make you question your life choices, they aren't real and personal enough to move you to consider abandoning the status quo.
For one, the setup creates a simplistic, non-engaging, false dichotomy:
Fashion is bad for the environment / Our solution is good for the environment.
It makes the subject society's pain points, not your specific prospect with their specific needs.
Second, we take a massive, existential problem and present a small, bite-size step in response. The bite-size step isn't the issue; the world's biggest crises are solved one step at a time. The problem is that we've psychologically primed the prospect to think in massive terms, then offered a solution that was never going to match the scale we just invoked.
And finally, the presumed hero of our story is society, not the individual. The psychological result is a lack of agency, a feeling of helplessness in the face of an inconvenient truth.
In this essay, the next installment of "De-Jargon Your Life," I'm going to cover three ways to move beyond the adjective and create real, compelling, emotionally sticky messaging where the stakes are highest: our future, and the future of our children.
Make It Specific
The definition of sustainable is "the ability to be maintained or continued over the long term without exhausting resources or causing severe damage."
Which means that when you use "sustainable" as a descriptor or differentiator, you're claiming your solution addresses the future of the world. No offense, but that's too big a problem for your textile made from banana peels to solve.
We need to take it as a given that we're addressing self-preservation and shift our attention to the challenges that got us here in the first place. Take the use of "sustainable" for textiles made from recycled materials. There are many roadblocks to universal use of recycled textiles: getting feedstock to the right place, distributing finished materials for production, creating high-performing materials, and doing all of that at a price consumers will accept without slapping on an "eco" label to make the premium more palatable.
Let's take a theoretical example: a banana-peel fabric that feels like silk while being even more durable. Simply calling it a "sustainable silk alternative" doesn't get to the specific pain point it solves. But if we use the concept of "regenerative" and imbue every aspect of the brand with a feeling of luxury, we've shifted the conversation to a different pain point: making organic materials that look and feel desirable.
Getting specific isn't enough. You also need to articulate what's different about your solution, and not just technically. Take Ecosis, which makes a polyester fiber from recycled polyester textiles. They have an ingenious patented technology, but their key differentiator is that they were created by, and are backed by, Filatex, a leading producer of polyester yarn. Which means that, unlike many nascent start-ups, they're attacking the problem of scale and source materials from the inside with the resources to make a difference. That theme should come across at every touchpoint.
Make It Personal
The first rule of marketing: step into the shoes of your audience. Find out who they are, what makes them tick.
So who is your audience and what is their pain? I promise you that their specific pain isn’t the industry’s environmental impact, and that they are likely keenly aware of the stats. Starting with data-dumping doesn't show them you understand; it piles onto a feeling of guilt and helplessness of a systemic problem much bigger than one person, one team, or one brand. Your job as a marketer is to help them see that your solution lets them control their small bit of the world. Or, even better, lets them be the hero.
To do that, you need to address their specific pain points. Take a designer. They might worry they'll be confined by a material's limitations, unable to design freely. If you're marketing a recycled fabric with exceptional quality, lean into how the fabric behaves, how it drapes, and that it looks and performs like an original.
Evrnu, a social purpose corporation that specializes in molecular regeneration of garment waste, addresses this directly by speaking to the individual's real fear: can recycled fabrics be "fashionable," or is something given up in quality? Their homepage features the "360 Hoodie," made from their Nucycl fabric, to show "the evolution from 'sustainable fashion' to just 'fashion,' dispelling any notion of compromise."
Evrnu builds on the message by speaking the designer's language, emphasizing that the hoodie is "ridiculously comfortable" and "sculpturally beautiful." They aren't actually selling the hoodie; they are selling the concept that you don't have to sacrifice good design to be eco-conscious.
Make It Unforgettable
By making our messaging specific and personal, we've created something compelling, targeted, and potentially sticky. But does it make you feel?
There is nothing more personal than what's at stake when we talk about sustainability. The future of our planet. The earth we'll leave behind. The guilt of our role in the crisis. The feeling of helplessness.
When we speak in abstract language about innovations, we miss something even more powerful: the hope, the optimism, and how good it feels to take even a small step toward minimizing our impact. But how do you do that without greenwashing? By humanizing the language through personal or relatable anecdotes.
Most of us know the experience of cleaning out a closet and facing piles of clothing we don't know how to dispose of or aren't emotionally ready to part with. Stacy Flynn, the CEO and co-founder of Evrnu, taps into this universal, human experience to explain how Nucycl was created using a "Strawberry Fields" T-shirt her mother gave her when she moved to New York. Instead of throwing out the shirt she treasured, she gave it new life. Everyone relates to owning something that is too meaningful to get rid of. That’s why the story sticks in your mind more than the composition details of Nucycl ever could.
A few years ago, I curated an event on transparency featuring Daniel Silverstein, the designer behind Zero Waste Daniel, which uses pre-consumer waste from New York's garment district and hard-to-recycle materials to create clothing and accessories without sending anything to landfill. I will never forget how he described visiting grocery stores in Brooklyn and feeling like people were trying to catch him with a piece of single-use plastic.
His message? There are flawed systems all around us, and we're all human. The best we can do is try. And if we all try a little bit, if we all take a little step, imagine what could happen.
This essay is my plea to the marketers in our little corner of a nearly $2 trillion industry. We don't have the power to solve the systemic issues. Most of us don't even have the remit to lessen a brand's actual impact. But we do have our words. And a voice. And platforms. And we have stories.
So let's tell those stories and be brave enough to get human, specific, and personal. We'll miss the mark sometimes, but all we can do is try. And if we all try a little bit, if we all take a little step, imagine what could happen.
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At Pi Brand Marketing Group, I help the people behind these innovations find language as specific as what they've built. Because the work deserves better than "sustainable."
