New Partnership with Innovation Forum and What North America Needs to Know About Sustainable Fashion and Apparel

The fashion and apparel industry is entering its most consequential regulatory era. Ahead of the Sustainable Apparel and Textiles Conference USA in New York City on June 3-4, Supply Chain Revolution partners with Innovation Forum for a new episode featuring Christine Goulay on where brands actually stand, why "resilience" is the new love language of sustainability, and what CSCOs and CFOs need on their H2 2026 agenda.

I am proud to announce a new partnership between Supply Chain Revolution and Innovation Forum, one of the leading platforms for driving business action on sustainability. Our first collaboration is a new episode featuring Christine Goulay, founder of Sustainabelle Advisory Services in Paris, setting the stage for Innovation Forum's Sustainable Apparel and Textiles Conference USA on Roosevelt Island in New York City on June 3-4, 2026.

This partnership reflects Supply Chain Queen's commitment to building content collaborations with organizations that share our values: candor over consensus, systems thinking over surface-level solutions, and a belief that supply chains are the most powerful lever for building a better world. Innovation Forum has spent over 30 years convening honest, Chatham House Rules conversations where corporate leaders come together to move beyond what Christine aptly calls the "blah blah blah" and into actionable strategy.

Christine Goulay brings 20 years of experience across the Kering Group (home to Gucci, Balenciaga, and Saint Laurent), UNEP, the Textile Exchange, and Fairly Made to this conversation. She has held operational roles in ethical and innovative brands, led sustainability strategy within one of the world's largest luxury groups, served as a board member and advisor to material startups and traceability companies, and contributed to macro-level systems change work with international bodies. She now runs Sustainabelle Advisory Services, where she continues to work with brands, NGOs, and innovators on sustainability strategy and innovation management.

What follows are the five insights from our conversation that I believe every supply chain leader in fashion and apparel needs to hear right now.

1. The Regulatory Wave Is No Longer Coming. It Is Here.

For decades, fashion and apparel escaped the regulatory scrutiny that energy, pharmaceuticals, and transportation have lived with for years. That era is over. The EU Digital Product Passport. Over 250 active Extended Producer Responsibility (EPR) schemes across Europe. The California Textile Recovery Act, with New York and Washington signaling they are next. For the first time in the industry's history, fashion and apparel are being regulated at a scale comparable to the most heavily governed sectors of the global economy.

The direct-health-and-safety nexus that historically triggered regulation in other industries has finally caught up to textiles, driven by the convergence of environmental harm, social labor concerns, and mounting evidence of the industry's contribution to the climate crisis. The regulatory response is not a single directive. It is a layered system of obligations that will reshape how brands source, design, manufacture, disclose, and take responsibility for the full lifecycle of every garment they produce.

For North American brands, the urgency is compounding. European regulation is setting the de facto global standard, and US state-level action in California, New York, and Washington means that waiting for federal guidance is no longer a viable strategy. Brands that have been treating regulation as a future risk are discovering it is a present-tense operating constraint.

2. Three Tiers of Brands, and a Silent Majority

Christine identifies three distinct tiers of fashion and apparel brands in 2026. The first tier is a core group of leaders who are integrating sustainability as risk reduction, competitive advantage, and customer connection. These brands are not treating sustainability as a compliance cost. They are treating it as an operating principle that strengthens supplier relationships, opens new revenue streams, and positions them to capture value as regulation reshapes the competitive landscape.

The second tier is a middle layer doing pure compliance arbitrage. These brands are calculating whether it is cheaper to invest in sustainable practices now or simply pay fines when regulations arrive. They are hedging, not leading. Their sustainability teams are active, their reporting is polished, but the procurement incentive structures underneath remain unchanged.

And then there is the silent majority. These brands have not yet meaningfully engaged. They are waiting to see what they will actually be forced to do, and they are hoping the regulatory timeline extends long enough to defer the hard decisions another season.

Where your organization falls on this spectrum determines your exposure to regulatory, reputational, and supply chain risk in the next 18 months. The suppliers who are de-risking, building traceability, and bringing data to the table are gravitating toward the first tier. The suppliers waiting to be told what to do are quietly being deprioritized. The best supplier relationships of the next decade are being formed right now.

3. The Love Language of Sustainability

One of the most striking insights from our conversation is Christine's observation that sustainability has a "love language," and that the language you use determines whether your initiatives move forward or stall before they start.

In today's US political and business climate, the word "ESG" can shut down a conversation before it starts. But "resilience" opens the same doors. The work is identical: risk reduction, supply continuity, total cost of ownership, supplier capacity building, materials certification. The framing determines whether it moves.

This is not about watering down sustainability ambitions. It is about understanding organizational psychology well enough to get the work funded and executed. Christine describes a framework that I have seen validated repeatedly in my advisory work: when you speak to the KPIs your CFO already cares about, you unlock budget. When you lead with moral arguments, you get a slide in the sustainability report and no operational change.

The love language insight is not just a communication tactic. It is a survival strategy for sustainability programs in the current political and corporate environment.

4. The P&L on Procurement Is a House of Cards

Christine challenges the traditional procurement profit-and-loss model head on, and this may be the most consequential insight in the entire conversation for anyone managing a sourcing budget.

The traditional procurement P&L looks at the cost of acquiring materials and manufacturing a product against the margin on first sale. In a linear economy, this math is straightforward. In the emerging regulatory and circular economy reality, it is dangerously incomplete. Total cost of ownership across the full product lifecycle, including resale value, repair and refurbishment potential, rental revenue, EPR fees, eco-modulation bonuses, unsold inventory write-downs, and end-of-life recovery, is the only honest math.

The France example is particularly compelling. Under France's EPR framework with eco-modulation, brands using certified sustainable inputs earn a 70-cent bonus per garment. The average EPR cost itself is just five to seven cents. The net economics are not just neutral. They are positive. Sustainability compliance in France is generating a revenue line, not a cost center. As eco-modulation schemes expand across Europe and eventually reach North American markets, the brands that have already restructured their procurement around total cost of ownership will have a structural advantage.

5. Every Team Member Needs a KPI Tied to Impact and Financials

This is the mechanism through which everything changes, or does not. Sourcing leads cannot choose certified materials if their entire performance review is tied to margin and cost reduction. Category managers cannot prioritize suppliers with strong traceability if their scorecard rewards lowest unit cost. Procurement directors cannot build the business case for total cost of ownership if the organization's planning systems are configured around first-sale margin alone.

The leaders in Christine's first tier are already restructuring these incentives. They are building RFPs where CO2 emissions are calculated into the overall cost envelope. They are creating sourcing scorecards that weight sustainability performance alongside cost, quality, and delivery. They are establishing impact KPIs around certified materials percentages, water use reduction, and supplier capacity building. This is how the work actually changes: not through sustainability reports or executive speeches, but through the incentive structures that drive daily procurement decisions.

As I shared on the episode: if you are just box checking, you might build an adequate supply chain, but it will not be extraordinary. It will not be innovative. It will not be future fit. The question for every CSCO, VP of Sourcing, and CFO planning for H2 2026 is whether the incentive architecture of your organization is aligned with the future you say you are building.

What Comes Next

Sustainable apparel is not a niche concern. It is a supply chain systems challenge that will require the same rigor, collaboration, and design thinking as any major operational transformation. The brands that treat it as a compliance exercise will build adequate supply chains. The brands that treat it as a strategic opportunity will build extraordinary ones.

The Innovation Forum's Sustainable Apparel and Textiles Conference USA on June 3-4 in New York City is where 230+ leaders will continue this conversation under Chatham House Rules: honestly, candidly, and with the intention of leaving with something actionable to bring back to their teams.

Watch and Listen to the Full Episode

Listen on your preferred platform:
YouTube  •  Apple Podcasts  •  Spotify

Join Us in New York

Sustainable Apparel and Textiles Conference USA
June 3-4, 2026  •  Roosevelt Island, New York City
230+ leaders  •  Chatham House Rules

Register for SAT-USA →

Connect

Christine Goulay: LinkedIn

Innovation Forum: LinkedIn  •  Website

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