A message from our CEO

How do you view the concept of fashion in regards to sustainability?
Fashion is and remains a form of self-expression. I’m proud to know that we play a part in that. We want to help people create their personal style and love what they buy for several seasons. And we want to make it easy for them to choose more sustainable fashion and to take care of their clothes in a conscious way.

How does sustainability fit with H&M’s business model and continued growth?
Our business idea is to offer fashion and quality at the best price. Sustainability is an increasingly important part of this. I strongly believe that sustainability will more and more become a hygiene factor in our industry. Our goal is for H&M to be at the forefront of sustainability. We work hard to always strengthen our customer offering. I think that adding sustainable value to our products is one of the keys to do so.

What opportunities do you see in integrating sustainability into the business model?
We take a long-term view on our business. And there is no way for us not to think about and invest in our sustainability, because it simply makes business sense. To begin with, using resources efficiently often means reducing costs. But there’s much more to this than the obvious.

And of course I’m also really happy to see that our customers and colleagues show such interest in sustainability. This opens great opportunities to strengthen our customer offering, build our brands and attract and retain the talent we need for our continued growth.

Contributing to economic growth, jobs and stability in our purchasing markets and creating strong partnerships with the best suppliers helps to secure the supply we need in the years to come. And more than that, our strong presence in these countries provides us with the great opportunity to improve the lives of hundreds of thousands of people and help develop entire communities.

What were the biggest steps on this journey in 2012?
We were named the biggest user of organic cotton in the world for the second year in a row. We are the first fashion retailer in the world to launch a global system to collect old clothes and help them to a new life.

In the long run, we want to upcycle these clothes into new ones, reducing the impact on the environment and providing us with access to future resources for making more sustainable fashion.

From 2013, together with WWF, we will set new standards for water stewardship in our industry.  Again, this collaboration opens great opportunities to engage our customers on the important issue of water and to help secure the availability of clean water for all of us in the years to come.

What are the challenges?
There are many challenges in our industry and our business. I’m proud of all my dedicated colleagues who work with great passion every day to make H&M and our industry more sustainable. But in order to achieve great results, we need to focus and, together with our stakeholders, balance the right priorities. To name a few of these priorities, it’s about closing the loop on textile fibres and waste and playing our part in combating climate change and growing water scarcity.

Ensuring that all workers in supplier factories earn enough to live on in a decent number of hours is another key challenge. It’s a complex issue and solutions need to consider the competitiveness and development of entire countries. Our whole industry has more to do to find and implement exactly such solutions. And the tragic, recent factory fires show again that safety can’t be taken  serious enough.

I also think that we have more to do to overcome common misconceptions such as that only  expensive products can be sustainable. In fact, the retail price of a garment doesn’t show how hard a brand has worked to improve conditions. Obviously, it is our job to engage more closely with our stakeholders and customers on this matter.

How do you work to tackle these challenges?
In a variety of ways. As an integral part of our day-to-day work and our strategy. And of course in the close collaboration with our suppliers and other stakeholders. But many of these challenges can’t be solved by one company alone. That’s why we play a very active role in initiatives like the Sustainable

Apparel Coalition and the Global Compact. And we need to support authorities in making the right decisions. For example, I met with Sheikh Hasina, Prime Minister of Bangladesh, to express H&M’s support to raise the minimum wage for garment workers and for regular wage reviews.

At H&M we believe in a fast pace and sometimes I feel that the changes we want to see do not happen as fast as we would like. But in order to create lasting improvements, we need to promote systemic change that involves everyone concerned. Our size gives us the opportunity to promote such change well beyond our own operations.

We see a lot of innovative smaller sustainable fashion brands on the market. I think this is a great development. At H&M, we can help lift such innovations to a larger scale. Together this will hopefully lead to a more sustainable fashion future.

30 years from now, where do you see H&M and sustainability in the fashion industry in general?
We take a long-term view on our business. My grandfather founded the company in 1947. I want to see H&M continue to be successful and create jobs and growth all over the world for many years to come. I want H&M to be seen as a leader in terms of innovation, sustainability and, of course, great fashion.

I hope that in the future, upcycling old clothes will be a standard in our industry, that workers in supplier factories can negotiate wages and working conditions in a fair dialogue with their employers, that making clothes will have a minimal impacts on waters and that consumers all over the world can easily build their personal style with sustainable fashion. And that H&M has played its part on this journey.