Conscious Consumerism Is No Longer Niche. Here's How Retailers Can Respond In Kind.
Retail - Strategy - 10 min read
Retailers who want to participate do best to build for it (rather than retrofit).
If your brand is committed to doing good, that choice can impact almost every corner of your business. For that reason, it can feel overwhelming to retailers who want to more closely align their business models with their social and environmental values. The sheer scope of what "conscious consumerism" could mean for a retailer covers everything from payroll and benefits packages to supply chain and warehousing choices to product and material design. Ultimately, conscious consumerism requires that brands set clear standards, and hold those standards sacred, even in a downturn.
That can be tough. But conscious consumerism can't just be a marketing campaign or a high-level values statement. To hold up under scrutiny, it has to be a foundational part of what you do. It must be a shared, and untouchable, belief.
The good news is that conscious consumerism isn't something that can be dismissed as a niche movement anymore; it's become an entrenched consumer behavior, and savvy retailers are responding in kind. According to a new report released by Capital One Research, the US eco-friendly retail market grows 173% faster than the conventional retail market, and is expected to be worth $544B in 2032. Meanwhile, a majority of buyers will still pay more for products that align with their personal values, even in spite of larger consumer trends towards value-seeking. Clearly, consumer decisions (especially among Gen Z and Millennial buyers) today are increasingly driven by both environmental and social concerns.
Read on to learn how we coach brands through the financial decisions that sit behind their commitment to conscious consumerism. You'll learn:
How to prioritize your first commitments to conscious consumers
The basics behind B Corp certification
How to start making more environmental or social commitments, no matter what your current business model looks like
Get clear on first principles.
Whether you are a new retailer or a seasoned brand, it's critical to define (or redefine) what conscious consumerism means to your organization. It can be tempting to go after every impactful initiative your team can dream up. Logistically, it's almost impossible to do so. And making promises you can't keep does lasting damage to your brand.
Instead, start by defining the three or four core values that your brand will always adhere to, no matter what:
Will the product itself be long-lasting or recyclable? What's the end of life for your product?
Will your manufacturing process use renewable energy?
What's your commitment to the workers who touch your product, including those who work in your manufacturing facility?
What is the carbon footprint of your distribution channels?
What marketing channels are you using? Do their brand values align with yours?
Once you've established those non-negotiables and incorporated them into your business model, you can start modeling out a roadmap to future-state commitments. Our rule of thumb is to commit early to things that are quite difficult to change—like product design and supply chain choices—and plan to add on simpler initiatives as the company matures.
Do Early
Core product design and materials commitments
Manufacturing facilities
Supply chain and logistics
Your network of retailers—choose based on their labor and supply chain practices too
Add Later
Expanded employee benefits
Communication practices—you can always be more transparent
Give back programs
Buy-back programs and other end-of-life initiatives
Philanthropic partnerships
Leaders should be ready to live out those first principles too. There are a variety of ways that the personal brands of executives overlap with the institutional brand they spearhead. But leaders who are making institutional commitments to conscious consumers need to embody many of those brand values across their personal brand as well. Consumers will hold these executives to high standards, and for good reason—they can't trust a brand that is led by someone who doesn't share their beliefs. This is especially important for early-stage companies who have yet to build the brand equity of a REI or an Uncommon Goods, and who often rely on the personal brand of founders to win early customers.
Case Study: Eileen Fisher
Eileen Fisher's sustainability commitments started as a personal conviction, not a brand strategy. She hired a head of social consciousness in 1997, decades before it was standard, and took the company to B Corp certification in 2016. And her own choices closely map to the brand's claims: she speaks openly about paying more for organic cotton even when the cost couldn't be passed to customers, and is an investor in Alante Capital, a fund backing other sustainable fashion founders. Through initiatives like Renew and the Waste No More line, Eileen Fisher has taken back and repurposed over a million garments, paying customers for returns rather than simply encouraging more consumption.
Case Study: L.L. Bean
You don't need to be a prestige brand to get conscious consumerism right. The same commitments to quality, customers, and planet that underpin Eileen Fisher's brand also sit behind retail icon L.L. Bean. The first batch of Bean boots, sold to customers in 1912, famously fell apart in weeks—and not only did Leon Bean make the fix, he replaced every single one, no questions asked. That commitment to durability and customer success has been at the center of the brand for seven decades.
Today, L.L.Bean has framed conservation and outdoor access as core to "being a family-owned, values-based company" that treats communities and the environment as stakeholders alongside customers and shareholders. Through its Outdoor Access Fund and Community Fund, the company has donated more than $6 million over five years to conservation and land stewardship, including a $1 million commitment to the Trust for Public Land specifically to build parks in communities without safe access to green space.
It does it all by delivering reasonably-priced, high-quality products that last well beyond the initial owner. Our favorite, intentional detail? The name plate stitched into every kid's jacket, with room for multiple names to be inked in as the coat continues its journey down the trail.
Is B Corp certification right for your business?
If your brand is truly ready to live those values, you might be interested in applying for B Corp certification. Becoming B Corp certified is a public commitment to stakeholders to build your business in a way that benefits people and the planet. It is not a change to your company's legal or tax structure—it is a third-party certification process that validates your business's commitments to doing good.
In our experience, the value of a B Corp certification lies in the process of completing it—the operational clarity it requires reveals weak spots and forces leadership to have the hard, honest conversations about assumptions and tradeoffs that are needed to develop strong social and environmental commitments. If you want to ensure that those commitments show up in everything your business does, B Corp certification will help you assess where you are now, and where you need to grow.
The process is more rigorous than most CEOs expect; beyond a high-level values statement, the process requires that companies submit comprehensive operational data and evidence in support of that statement too. The certification looks at six key assessment criteria:
Employees cover things like gender mix, lowest pay relative to minimum wage, and benefits.
Vendors cover relationships and practices involving suppliers.
Environmental impact includes office and warehouse utilities, water and electricity usage, remote-work setup, shipping method, and freight footprint.
Product design and materials assesses the sustainability of your products and materials.
Community covers how the company participates in or gives back to the communities where it operates and where employees live.
Supply chain covers manufacturing, warehousing, third-party logistics, freight, and related impacts.
Retailers in particular should be prepared to provide deep operational evidence into almost every component of their business. The review can extend into freight choices, warehouse usage, energy and utility use, shipment volume, and, of course, materials.
A key takeaway: you can't submit for certification before you reach B Lab's threshold for success. That means that when you do submit, B Lab is simply confirming your claims in your application. We've seen this process help companies who want to do more, but are falling short: it forces them to understand the economic tradeoffs, and to do the modeling and roadmapping required to actually make them work.
It's difficult to assign revenue boosts to a B Corp certification. And in our view, the value of a certification goes well beyond a marketing campaign. It is a brand commitment that builds credibility with informed audiences, and enables stronger decision-making and operational clarity. Most of all, it is a mechanism for embedding values into the organization's culture and economics. We encourage our clients pursuing B Corp certification to hold these commitments sacred—and we work closely with them to maintain those commitments when they are challenged by real financial tradeoffs, year after year.
What to do when your business model doesn't measure up.
We've seen plenty of retailers try to transition towards a more conscious model over the last decades, from Levi's water commitments to IKEA's buyback programs and sustainable materials upgrades. It's definitely possible for brands that didn't initially set out to do conscious consumerism—or who lost their way through the gears of growth—to recommit. But it takes a hard, honest look at how every piece of your business model really stacks up against today's standards.
Where your company really isn't hitting the mark, it's time to look at what can be changed, and the cost and timeline of doing so. Some pieces of the puzzle can't be switched out; denim, for example, is a cotton material, and cotton is famously water-hungry. Almost no denim manufacturers are rushing to replace cotton as the cornerstone material in their products. The innovation and time required to do so—years of costly research and development to get to an end-product that's comparable to our beloved blue jeans—isn't yet something that the denim industry is ready to commit to.
If you can't touch a core process or product feature, you can start to offset impact by pulling more flexible levers. Denim brands have responded to their products' fundamental sustainability issues through innovation in upcycling and recycling denim, sourcing organic cotton, and following Water<Less techniques in the manufacturing process. All of these initiatives have taken time and investment to accomplish, but they are substantially more doable than replacing cotton across the board.
Intention matters too. Many companies are forced into adopting more sustainable choices because of supply chain challenges or regulations; that's not really designing your business model to do good, even if good is a side effect of the change. Like any social construction, businesses operationalize the codified assumptions, beliefs, and values of the people who run them. If your brand wasn't initially set up to be a triple bottom line business, it will require deep transformation to make it so. Your core value proposition will need reassessment. That could force an existential shift to your brand identity, your product, and your customer base too. The hard truth is that not every company wants to make that transformation—and not every company is capable of pulling it off.
But every company can do something to help the planet and people. Small changes are meaningful too, if they come from a place of authentic belief and positive intent.
Conscious consumerism isn't going away, and retailers who want to participate do best to build—rather than retrofit—for it. Regardless of where you're starting, making social and environmental commitments requires sound financial planning. A seasoned CFO who has been there and done that is indispensable to every conversation.
Whether you're exploring B Corp certification, or simply wanting to make greener or more socially conscious choices, we can help. Book a call to talk with a Level Pro today.
