What drives Patagonia to focus on sustainable sourcing of wool?

1. What drives Patagonia to focus on sustainable sourcing of wool? If it’s about customer expectations: do you care about this when buying fashion/sports wear?

2. Can companies like Patagonia be held accountable for what their suppliers do and if so how can they make sure that their suppliers don’t violate (i.e. that they ‘comply’) with their sustainability standards?

https://apparelinsider.com/patagonia-raises-bar-sustainable-wool-sourcing/

Discussion 2:

Today GDP rules businesses and the world economy. This week, we aim to think of a new paradigm and to consider another indicator that we call carbon footprint. It could be considered as a key indicator to analyze businesses’ performance. A carbon footprint is historically defined as the total greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions caused by an individual, event, organization, or product.

The Paris Agreement (2015) for the first time brings all nations into a common cause to undertake ambitious efforts to reduce their carbon footprint as a mean to strengthen the global response to the threat of climate change. As an illustration, to respect this agreement, the European Union must reduce, by 2050, its GHG by at least 80% to 95% compared to 1990 levels.

This ambitious challenge raises the question of the evolution of regulatory forces. While today, carbon footprint reduction is mainly self-assessed by firms, we foresee that in a near future they may be faced with new constraining regulations.

In this context and as a future manager, how would you tackle the limitation of the carbon footprint resulting from your business?

Discussion 3:

Considering that under a financial perspective, CSR is seen as a project/investment that a company should be involved in only when it can earn more than the associated costs and thus, create value; Do you see this as a “win-win” approach, where all stakeholders are benefited without firms deteriorating their financial condition, or as another “market gimmick” where firms try to find alternative ways to increase their market share?