The GANNI Playbook: How to get started creating a responsible business is a new release by GANNI co-founder Nicolaj Reffstrup and sustainability journalist Brooke Roberts-Islam. Danish fashion brand GANNI combines ‘practical ease with stylistic abandon’: think “front-row fabulous (but on a bike)”*. In 2023, GANNI made the Time100 Most Influential Companies list alongside the likes of SpaceX, Apple, and TikTok, where it was lauded for its ‘eco-conscious fashion’. What GANNI says and does influences the world of fashion, and has echoes that reverberate far beyond.

SUSTAINABLE RESPONSIBLE

‘If I truly wanted to avoid carbon pollution, the first thing I would do is to close down GANNI’, says co-founder Nicolaj Reffstrup. Nicolaj acknowledges that any ‘excess consumption more than what is needed’ is unsustainable. ‘I’ve been involved in the climate-change agenda for 25 years. But I own a fashion company - so there is a contradiction, right there. I’m a total hypocrite.’

As a result, Nicolaj doesn’t call GANNI a sustainable business: he calls it responsible; ‘fashion cannot be sustainable in today’s emissions-intensive production and consumption model’.

A (non-exhaustive) list of things that might be seen as making GANNI responsible:

• B Corp Certification

• Cancelling their bestselling virgin leather products ‘because we cannot justify their impact’

• Research & Development on innovative materials as part of their in-house ‘Fabrics of the Future’ programme

• Self-imposed ‘carbon tax’ on materials and textiles

• 44 Responsibility Goals (achieving 40 of them in 2022 and laying out a 2023 Responsibility Gameplan 2.0 with a deadline of 2025)

• Strategy to achieve a 50% absolute reduction in carbon emissions by 2027 (against a 2021 baseline).

In 2018, Nicolaj stood down as CEO to focus his work on the brand’s sustainability efforts and the GANNI Lab. Originally set up in partnership with the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), the GANNI Lab set out to create a carbon neutral collection of products, which although ‘didn’t work out’, ‘accelerate[d] the work on responsibility and led to the creation of the GANNI Lab Instagram account, as well as the virtual R&D department (now called Fabrics of the Future, or FOTF)’. FOTF invests in start-ups such as biotech and materials companies in hopes of growing ‘new, truly sustainable fabrics in the way ‘faux meat’ is now being created’.

The 2023 GANNI responsibility report is available here.

is this just good marketing?

Nicolaj is very aware of this criticism. ‘In the past, we’ve been pretty cautious in communicating our responsibility efforts. We didn’t want to sound self-righteous, and frankly, we were scared of being called out for greenwashing. I even thought twice about publishing this book. I don’t want people to think that I’m exploiting sustainability and the climate crisis as a marketing stunt - to create more buzz around my company.’

There is a lot of honesty in the book, a candidness where things that have not always worked out as expected. For example, GANNI replacing their plastic bags in retail stores with compostable ones turned out to be ‘moot point because there was no infrastructure at municipality level of separate and compost them’. On top of that, ‘the retail stores reported they were falling to bits almost immediately’. GANNI scrapped the compostable bags.

The changes GANNI have implemented have not come without their challenges. Co-founder Ditte Reffstrup says, ‘[f]rom the creative side, it has sometimes been super frustrating. For many years, lower-impact fabrics of high quality have been limited, which restricted our designs’. GANNI made the decision to phase out a very successful range of leather cowboy boots due to their carbon footprint. But, there have also been new products through FOTF. Ditte says, ‘now I don’t see limitations, I see opportunities with the new material alternatives’.

Interestingly, Reffstrup talks about not using sustainability as a USP. He believes that ‘in the future all fashion brands will have to be sustainable either by law or through consumer demand. So in the long run, behaving sustainability won’t be a unique positioning, but rather a prerequisite for doing business.’ From this, it might be understood that GANNI are not trying to position themselves as market leaders because of their sustainability efforts. They want to create good products, in a responsible manner. They want others to have the tools to do the same. The Playbook might be seen as an attempt to share how they are achieving that alongside achieving business success.

Next steps

‘Most days, I feel like a hypocrite. The state of the planet is dire. I don’t believe that at GANNI we’re doing anything close to enough.’ The Playbook is not an indefeasible guide, it’s more modest: ‘[t]his book feels like a decent stab at a version 1.0 if a playbook on how to run a responsible business’.

Early on in the book, Nicolaj talks about how he would like it if someone came along and provided a better version of the Playbook. ‘Someone will write an even better book… I want a company to come long, improve our models and tools, constructively criticise what we’re doing, spur change and contribute to the overall progression of the fashion industry - or any other industry for that matter’.

Sustainability and acting in ways that protect the environment, maintain biodiversity, and protect against the effects of climate change do not usually benefit from an all-or-nothing attitude. The GANNI Playbook is a good start and GANNI are doing exciting things when it comes to the future of fashion. The Playbook is an encouraging read for those looking to build responsible businesses or those looking to understand how one might operate. ∎

*All quotes are taken from The GANNI Playbook (2024). Image taken from page 37.