The Sustainable 20

KMD Brands is now certified under B Corp's Version 2 standards, one of the first businesses in Australia to clear a bar that no longer hands out a score. Instead of a single number, companies must meet minimum requirements across a wider set of impact topics, verified by third-party audits, with further requirements to meet at year three and year five. Group head of ESG Shasta O'Loughlin has overseen the shift, on top of a circularity push that already runs deep. Rip Curl's global Recycle Your Wetsuit program has diverted 77,000 kilograms of neoprene – almost 64,000 wetsuits – from landfill in five years, while Kathmandu's REDU program restores damaged returns rather than writing them off. Next on the list: diverting 90 per cent of waste from its direct operations away from landfill and supporting the three brands to meet ambitious preferred material goals, both by 2030.

Australia sends more than 200,000 tonnes of clothing to landfill every year, and The Iconic is building a way out for its two million-plus active customers. Under chief commercial and sustainability officer Gayle Burchell, the platform launched ReIconic, a single hub for pre-loved, repair, donation and recycling. Pre-loved sits alongside partners including Cirkular and Azura Reborn, while RCYCL and Rewear handle donating and recycling. Its Rescued program intercepts faulty stock at the warehouse, with more than 1,400 items diverted to Revibe, repaired and relisted at a 52 per cent average sell-through. This is further buoyed by a pilot launch in March 2026 with alterations platform Hello Tailr – a first for a multi-brand online retailer in Australia.

Erika Martin is taking Country Road Group's sustainability work well beyond its own stores and supply chains. As head of sustainability, she helped steer the group into ReFashioning, a collaboration with RMIT University and Sustainability Victoria in which eight product and design teams across Country Road, Trenery, Witchery and Politix road-tested circular design in a live commercial setting. The result is a guide anyone in the industry can download for free, and one Martin says delivered a clear vision for circular design. The same outward focus runs through the Country Road Climate Fund, a $1.5 million commitment whose grants she helped shape: Mud to Marle's second life for low-value wool, the Guide to Surplus linking designers with spare fabric, and a $200,000 grant with Trust for Nature to protect plains-wanderer habitat.

Alice Polglase has spent close to a decade proving sustainability and commercial performance make a good pairing. Sustainability sits under her remit at Cotton On Group, and the sharpest proof is the circularity play now built into checkout. Online shoppers buying women's apparel can opt in to a pre-prepared eBay Australia listing, complete with images, product details and suggested pricing, tapping Gen Z's appetite for pre-loved fashion. Behind it sits a product pipeline built to last longer: water-saving denim technology, lower-impact fibres, and a supplier grading system that weighs sustainability alongside ethical sourcing and quality. Reuse and recycling partners including Thread Together and Upparel pick up from there.

Decjuba committed to B Corp certification, submitted its impact assessment in FY25 and secured the badge in December 2025. Senior sustainability advisor Soleil Ritchie is part of the team behind that push, and the work goes well beyond the certificate. Every Decjuba location now runs on 100 per cent renewable energy, up from 32 per cent in FY23, and all Tier 1 and Tier 2 factories are disclosed. Resale is where customers come in. The Authentified platform builds circularity into the customer account, generating listings in seconds and routing garments to resale, repair or donation through Salvos Stores. More than 3,000 Decjuba items were recirculated in 2025, plus over 1,000 through multi-brand resale, avoiding an estimated 50 tonnes of CO2e. Certification was the goal; behaviour change is the proof.

ELK treats giving as part of how it trades. Co-founder Marnie Goding has built that into the business, and the numbers show it. In FY25 the brand donated $167,816 through 1% for the Planet, planted 43,900 native seedlings with TreeProject (more than 230,000 since 2020) and lifted its volunteer hours to 1,522, past its 1,500 goal. Matched giving has raised nearly $7,000 for the Environmental Defenders Office. When the Federal Government opened around 2.5 million hectares of the Southern Ocean to gas exploration, ELK put donation devices in nine stores for 12 weeks, raised $3,294 for Surfrider Foundation Australia and helped stage a paddle out that drew 1,500 people. Goding funded the volunteers' safety vests herself. Behind it sits a B Corp score of 100.6.

By volume, 96 per cent of M.J. Bale's collections are built from natural fibres: 56 per cent cotton, 25 per cent wool, 10 per cent silk and 5 per cent linen. Sustainability and impact manager Peta Bilton is part of the team behind that mix, and the brand is willing to show where it comes from. Selected garments, including the Robertson suit and the Bradfield and Martelly shirts, use Masters of FLAX-certified linen traced to farms in Normandy, the Netherlands and Belgium. The flax is grown from GMO-free seed, with no chemicals, natural rainfall instead of irrigation and zero waste, then woven into cloth by Vitale Barberis Canonico in the Italian Alps. Behind it sits a B Corp score of 84.2 against the 80-point bar, with Bilton targeting a higher score at the 2027 recertification.

Thirty-plus brands, one table, and Lorna Jane at the head of it. The activewear pioneer founded and leads an industry-wide Living Wage Working Group, backed by Oxfam's What She Makes campaign, which now brings together more than 30 brands tackling the structural barriers to fair pay in global garment supply chains. That collective approach defines Anna Fowler's tenure as CEO. On her watch, Lorna Jane has traced 100 per cent of its Tier 1 suppliers and all four of its Tier 2 fabric mills. It has launched a Preferred Fibre Program that screens for high-risk cotton origins, and it now pays non-trade suppliers only once they complete ESG onboarding. Oxfam rates it a ‘Step 5’ brand. Fowler also sits on the board of Seamless, the national clothing stewardship scheme, putting her ahead of the curve on circularity.

At Big W, the cotton in a T-shirt comes with proof. The retailer was the first in Australia to achieve Better Cotton certification, and this year more than 12.5 million garments were sourced using traceable Better Cotton. Its quality assurance doesn't take those claims on trust. Working with Oritain, Big W tests the fibres of finished clothes against their chemical fingerprint, confirming Australian origin claims at a 90 per cent positive rate last year. As the first Australian retail brand in the program's Gold Membership tier, it now extends that testing to suppliers so they can verify their own supply chains. Product sustainability reaches the factory floor too: a five-year partnership with Quantum Knits, a 20,000-strong team in India, earned the supplier Big W's 2025 Sustainability Supplier of the Year. Head of quality assurance and product sustainability Nadene Smith sits at the centre of that work.

R.M.Williams has always built boots to be repaired after being well-used.  Louise Peck is now pushing that thinking further up the supply chain. As head of product and design operations, she sits at the centre of a brand-wide shift towards regenerative materials. Leather is the frontline. Ninety-two per cent now comes from Leather Working Group and Sustainable Leather Foundation tanneries, 59 per cent of it from the top ‘Gold’ and ‘Silver’ tiers. Two pilots are pairing Australian and New Zealand tanneries with farming co-operatives pursuing low-carbon and regenerative certification. Fibres are moving too: 88 per cent of Spring/Summer 25 volume came from preferred fibres, including carbon-neutral Good Earth Cotton tracked from the gin through every production step. By 2030, every hide should come from Gold-rated tanneries, traced to its region, with emissions per boot halved.

96.9. That is Bellroy's latest B Corp score, nearly double the global median of 50.9, earned on its fourth certification. Now co-founder Andy Fallshaw is steering the carry brand into its next test. Bellroy's new Climate Action Plan commits to running its offices and future stores on at least 80 per cent renewable energy by 2030, and to building a full Scope 3 emissions baseline in FY27, alongside its first climate-related financial disclosures report. Fallshaw and his fellow co-founder will lead the rollout personally. The foundations are already in place: every main body fabric and lining is now made from 100 per cent recycled materials, up from roughly 30 per cent in 2019. Scored. Recycled. Measured next.

At Myer Group – including Apparel Brands – what leaves Myer's stores is a sustainability achievement. Under sustainability manager Natalie Uren's remit, the group diverted 72.3 per cent of its waste from landfill against a 70 per cent target, extending its programs to FOGO, e-waste and the construction waste from store refurbishments. Apparel hangers are part of the loop, with 72 per cent reused through a reverse logistics partnership with Pact Group. The circular network reaches customers, too. Salvos textile donations diverted about 2.09 tonnes from landfill, Tefal's cookware recycling ran across 31 stores and collected more than four tonnes, textile off-cuts and samples go to Textile Recyclers Group, and LookSmart offers alterations and repairs, including benefits for MYER one members.

Hanes Australasia has held APCO’s Leading level for packaging performance for seven years running, and the numbers show why. Under general manager of sustainability Sheree Maguire, the business behind Bonds, Berlei and Sheridan cut packaging weight by 28 per cent on 2019 levels in 2025, beating its 25 per cent goal, and reached 72 per cent plastic elimination. Rigid plastic in in-store displays fell from 9.5 tonnes in 2023 to zero in 2025. At Sheridan, the average plastic packaging per product sold dropped from 16 grams to 12 in a year. The next wave is already locked in: card sock hooks arriving this year are expected to remove up to 14 tonnes of rigid plastic annually, and card multipacks will strip out up to 34 tonnes of soft plastic from late 2027. Less plastic, every year.

Unwearable. Unsellable. Then, in the hands of a final-year fashion student, something else entirely. That's the premise of ReCut, the circular design program Athena Savvas counts as a key sustainability win for Dissh. It was piloted in 2025 with the Centre of Excellence in Sustainable Fashion + Textiles. Garments that would otherwise be recycled go to emerging designers to recut and reimagine, at no cost to students already squeezed by cost-of-living pressures. The results went further than expected: the work was featured in RUSSH, showcased at Australian Fashion Week, and made circular design a foundation of the coursework rather than an add-on. This year ReCut was formalised, student numbers doubled, and Collarts joined returning partners UTS and TAFE NSW. "We will not solve this challenge alone," Savvas says.

Anyone can look up who makes APG & Co's clothes. The group behind Sportscraft, Saba and Jag publishes its full supplier list, and group sustainability manager Neha Nagpal is pushing that visibility much further down the chain. In FY25, every Tier 1 supplier went live on the Retraced traceability platform, with suppliers mapping 120 upstream connections, from spinning mills to tanneries, and reaching as deep as Tier 6 in select product categories. Tier 1 suppliers also moved onto SEDEX and independent SMETA 4-Pillar audits: 92 factories and facilities were audited, and none received a Red rating. The group ran its first formal living wage gap analysis across 25 production facilities in China, Vietnam, India and Indonesia, then joined an industry Living Wage Working Group. The groundwork is laid. Now comes the harder part: closing the gap.

Felicity McGahan leads a team that's turned a 99-year-old luggage and handbag retailer into one of the sector's more transparent supply chains. Under her remit, Strand – the group that also looks after Antler – earned a "Leading" rating in its latest APCO packaging report, with 91 per cent of packaging now made using recycled content and 76 per cent optimised for material efficiency. On ethical sourcing, the team completed 81 factory site visits across 67 Tier 1 sites in six countries, held 100 per cent social compliance audit coverage, and got every identified Tier 2 supplier to sign its Code of Conduct for the first time. No cases of modern slavery were identified across the group's operations or supply chain. With Tier 3 raw-material mapping and multilingual factory-floor grievance channels next on the agenda, McGahan's team isn't stopping at a strong result.

Nagnata has gained B Corp certification with a score of 87.8, above the qualifying score of 80, anchored by a standout 29 points in the environment category alone. Co-founded by sisters Laura May Gibbs and Hannah Stenmark, the Byron Bay activewear label backs that score with specific numbers: 72.5 per cent of its FY25–26 raw materials are natural fibres, 91.48 per cent of its cotton is certified organic, 80.43 per cent of its wool is Responsible Wool Standard certified, and 74.17 per cent of its synthetics are Global Recycled Standard certified. From FY26–27, its Byron Bay headquarters and retail stores will run on GreenPower, and a workforce that's 80 per cent female sits behind a brand that's now exploring seaweed-based fibres and bio-leathers as its next frontier.

At Assembly Label, supply chain policy doesn't sit with one person at the top – it's jointly owned by the CEO and Rebecca Bowser, head of production operations, who both oversee implementation together. Under that structure, Bowser's team assessed 100 per cent of the brand's active Tier 1 manufacturing base in FY25 – 26 factories across China, Turkey and India – and extended audits to 23 per cent of its 53 Tier 2 mills and tanneries. The Code of Conduct bans recruitment fees, and Assembly Label guarantees no penalties for late deliveries, removing a key incentive for suppliers to push forced overtime. “As a business, we are constantly re-evaluating our work in an effort to better contribute to our community and act in a way that is socially and environmentally responsible. This is an ongoing journey, and there is always room for improvement,” the company reports.

The Sussan Group is shifting its ranges at Sussan, Suzanne Grae and Sportsgirl towards responsible fibres, and ethical sourcing manager David Nesbitt sits within the system behind it. Responsible fibres made up 35 per cent of the range in FY25 and around 42 per cent through FY26, with 50 per cent the target for FY27. The group has made more than five million garments with fully traceable Australian cotton and sourced 706 tonnes of Better Cotton against a 232-tonne goal. Circularity is moving alongside it. As a Foundation Partner of Seamless, Australia's first national clothing stewardship scheme, the group has completed its full Seamless Circularity Action Plan, and 20 team members have finished formal circular design training, ahead of the first circular design garments in 2027. Unsold samples are heading to the Remote OpShop Project and Thread Together.

LSKD has signed a decade-long deal with Samsara Eco to move key product lines from nylon 6 to enzymatically recycled nylon 6,6 from 2028 - its first use of fibres regenerated from end-of-life textiles. Samsara's AI-designed enzymes break worn-out garments, blends included, back into their molecular building blocks, which are then rebuilt into new fibre. Raw materials and supply chain manager Logan McNally calls the result "softer, stronger, more durable". Now add the scale. Founder Jason Daniel has built LSKD to just over 30 stores and more than $200 million in revenue, with 70 stores across five countries planned within three years. Every new store means more product. Daniel has already locked in what a key part of it will be made from.