Amazon Spins Out Fashion Coalition to Drive Down Green Material Costs

Amazon is launching a fashion coalition of more than 60 brands, manufacturers, retailers and material innovators, aiming to make sustainable materials as cheap as conventional ones through aggregated demand.

The Climate Pledge Fashion Coalition, spun out today from the net-zero initiative Amazon co-founded in 2019, counts Stella McCartney, Another Tomorrow, Brooks Running, Anna Sui, Selfridges and Vestiaire Collective among its members. The World Economic Forum and the forest-conservation nonprofit Canopy are also backing the program.

On the supply side, the coalition includes Circ, a textile recycling company; Unspun, which makes zero-waste knitting technology; and Bananatex, a plant-based fiber company.

Members get access to the Fashion Coalition Lever Library, a database of more than 100 decarbonization solutions. It includes guidance on how to use each fiber and a directory of suppliers. The coalition is also working with the World Economic Forum on financing models that pair financial institutions with private investors to fund promising materials.

Why fashion

Sally Fouts, director of The Climate Pledge at Amazon, says the team chose fashion because it is a heavy emitter and existing sustainability coalitions have not made much progress on their goal. It is also an industry consumers relate to personally. "Fashion is a pretty personal thing for people," she says. Other high-emitting sectors the Pledge works on, like shipping, aren't "an everyday thing that they put on their body and care deeply about."

The economics are the core problem. Low-carbon materials already exist, from recycled fibers to mushroom-based leather. But fashion brands often operate on thin margins and cannot afford to pay a premium for them. Meanwhile, the startups making those materials cannot lower prices until they reach scale, and they cannot reach scale without big orders.

The coalition's answer is to aggregate demand so suppliers can count on large orders. The Climate Pledge will also identify the most eco-friendly mills and spinners and help them scale quickly. The hope is that as volumes grow, costs drop. "The goal is cost parity at least, if not even lower than current materials," Fouts says.

Peter Majeranowski, CEO of Circ, is optimistic Amazon can deliver. "Amazon has done this before in other sectors, whether it's creating low-carbon cement or sending demand signals for Rivian by putting in orders for electric vans," he says.

The terms of entry

Joining is free, but it comes with commitments. Signatories must agree to reach net-zero carbon by 2040, a decade ahead of the Paris Climate Agreement. They must measure and report their emissions regularly and decarbonize their own operations as much as possible. If they still cannot reach net-zero, they may buy carbon offsets. "We have quite a bit of language around what qualifies as a credible offset," Fouts says.

The fast-fashion gap

The coalition has a notable gap: most of its brands are higher-end labels. The bulk of clothing sold today is cheap fast fashion, including much of what Amazon itself makes and sells through private-label lines like Amazon Essentials. Fouts argues that lower-priced brands, with even thinner margins, will join once costs fall. "The goal is to bring the cost of those materials down so that the larger, lower-price-point manufacturers and fashion companies are able to also have access to these products," she says. "That's the ultimate win."

That logic also lets the biggest players off the hook for now. Amazon has enormous purchasing power, and its private-label brands could serve as the anchor customer that makes these materials viable. As of today, Amazon's own apparel brands are not leading the switch to less carbon-intensive materials. "Where it makes sense to incorporate one of these new materials or new solutions, we'll be looking at those, just as all of the other companies that are in the Pledge and in the coalition will be doing," Fouts says.

The launch comes at a moment when the broader sustainability movement has gone quiet. Fouts says the roughly 700 companies within Amazon's Climate Pledge are not slowing down, and that climate investments play out over decades. "They're in the game, they're doing the work, they're making investments," she says. Whether Amazon turns its own purchasing power into the anchor demand the coalition needs will determine if sustainable fashion moves from premium niche to mass-market price point.