Amazon announced plans last week to open Amazon Style, its first clothing store that promises to merge the best of online and in-person shopping. It has the potential to transform the shopping experience — and sustainability advocates are watching closely to see what the knock-on effects might be for fashion’s impact on the planet.
Last year, a lot of planning was done around fashion sustainability — but less action. The biggest theme as we head into 2022 is the interconnection between carbon emissions, equity and supply chain.
Amazon declined an interview request to discuss how sustainability fits into the store’s business plan or what it could mean for the industry’s footprint. The company hasn’t disclosed the brands that will be sold in the store, though it has said it will use a combination of buyer curation and customer data to make selections, and a spokesperson told Vogue Business that Amazon Style will carry some sustainable products, including “brands committed to sustainability and Amazon-owned brands promoting the use of sustainably-produced fabrics and recycled materials”.
More criteria on how sustainability is determined by Amazon was not shared. On its website, Amazon says it prioritises supply chain sustainability and transparency and that it is a member of the Sustainable Apparel Coalition. “We are working to lower the environmental impact of our Amazon-owned Private Brands apparel products, and we partner directly with our suppliers to find solutions that promote the use of sustainably produced fabrics and recycled materials,” it wrote in its 2020 sustainability report, published last June.
Among the details that have been made public about Amazon Style, most notable is the store’s product recommendation technology, which uses machine learning algorithms to make real-time, personalised product suggestions for customers based on what they pick up and scan within the store (each item will have a QR code to show product details including sizes, colours and customer ratings), as well as personal details they have shared such as style and fit preferences. This technology could be an opportunity to reduce waste in the industry, experts say, if it can cut down on customer returns — which are costly not only for brands, but for the planet — or help brands improve sales forecasting. Bringing consumers into a physical store should inherently reduce returns compared with e-commerce.
“Online returns have become somewhat out of control over the last decade because consumers have been over-buying to try to find the right fit,” says Beth Esponnette, cofounder and chief product officer at on-demand manufacturer Unspun. However, Amazon’s business model depends on continued volume growth, and Amazon did not respond to questions about whether or not the store’s technology is designed to reduce waste or shift buying habits.
Little is known about where else sustainability might fit in the store’s plans. The press statement did not address sustainability.
Front of mind for sustainability experts is overproduction and overconsumption across the industry. For Amazon Style, questions remain if it will encourage customers to consume more, prompted by the technology serving up product recommendations in real time.
“This concept has the effect of pushing more purchasing options at the customer,” says Lynda Grose, chair of fashion design at California College of the Arts (CCA) and co-founder of the Union of Concerned Researchers in Fashion. “This speeds the flow of garments into the customer’s cart and speeds the extraction of associated resources to make those garments.”
Consumer behaviour
Author and sustainable fashion consultant Aja Barber says customers need to be more mindful about what they’re buying and realise they may not always need new clothes. The Amazon store, she thinks, will lead customers in exactly the opposite direction. “If you're looking to upsell people — which is part of the problem with overconsumption — this is great,” she says. It’s not a solution, though, “if you want people to be more thoughtful about what they actually need.”
Amazon’s data-driven approach to shopping could reduce waste in some areas, perhaps by helping them avoid buying clothes they’ll never actually wear, for example. “If it results in lower rates of returns and longer use for garments — and both would need to be studied, not assumed — then potentially yes, [the in-store shopping technology] could facilitate lower levels of consumption and resource use,” says Timo Rissanen, associate professor at the University of Technology Sydney and founding member of the Union of Concerned Researchers in Fashion.
He’s unconvinced, though, that such a scenario will play out. Amazon is sustaining double-digit growth, a trend it is expected to continue through the end of the year and beyond, driven in part by retail growth and expanding into new business categories. “Amazon should use its considerable leverage, both as a widely known brand and as an economic powerhouse, to invest in business models that authentically and significantly reduce consumption and resource use, through more satisfying products and deeper relationships between people and garments, and business and customers,” says Rissanen.
Likewise, experts say it might be feasible for the Amazon Style technology to reduce waste on the industry side by helping brands to “right-size” their production and decrease their volumes of unsold inventory — “which would have a positive environmental outcome on future collections,” says Alante Capital founder and managing partner Karla Mora.
Amazon has a number of initiatives it says are helping the company to build a “sustainable business for our customers and the planet”, from renewable energy to using more recycled packaging. In 2019, it published a list of over 1,000 suppliers of Amazon-branded products, including apparel, a move well-received by human rights and environmental advocates. However, last June, the company reported that while it had lowered its carbon intensity in 2020, its absolute (total) emissions had increased by 19 per cent. And, in December, conservation group Oceana estimated that Amazon generated 599 million pounds of plastic packaging waste in 2020 — a 29 per cent increase over the year prior — with up to 23.5 million pounds thought to end up in oceans and waterways.
While the online retailer has faced criticisms on a range of issues — the plastic waste it generates; working conditions in its warehouses; failed union attempts; and the climate cost of fast shipping — Amazon has demonstrated continued revenue growth and persistent customer loyalty.
Vogue Business asked Amazon about its plans to incorporate or promote sustainability in its Amazon Style store, including offering a recycling or resale scheme, as well as its sustainability standards for its private-label brands. Additionally, Vogue Business asked Amazon to respond to concerns that the store could encourage impulse purchases.
In a statement, Amazon’s spokesperson said it’s prioritising energy efficiency in physical stores through LED lighting, energy-reducing lighting controls and natural daylighting techniques, adding: “In addition to diverting construction waste from landfill, Amazon Style plans to use energy and carbon measuring tools to analyse, measure and monitor our on-going consumption.”
Can tech drive sustainability?
While the role that technology can and should play in making fashion more sustainable is a subject of much debate, there’s a consensus that it does have some benefits to offer. Proponents say on-demand manufacturing, for example, stands to slash the amount of waste produced in fashion by eliminating or reducing the problem of unsold inventory.
“Used in the right way, technology can make the fashion industry more sustainable,” says Unspun’s Esponnette. On its website, Amazon says the store will offer “hundreds of brands and thousands of styles under one roof" and will have frequently updated selections “so customers can discover new items each time they visit”. Esponnette sees such claims as an indication the store is likely to operate with more of a fast fashion model, with ready-made inventory that needs to be sold or will otherwise go to waste. “In this case, the technology used does not help with sustainability,” she says.
The Amazon Style tech could provide opportunities to nudge consumers toward more sustainable behaviours, she says, which would be significant because shopping habits are a big part of fashion’s impact. “Since Amazon's recommendation technology is based on what Amazon knows about you, one example of a way to improve sustainability would be for the software to remind customers when they are purchasing something similar to a product they already have,” says Esponnette. She doesn’t foresee Amazon using it for this purpose, though, and analysts commenting anonymously do not expect other retailers to adopt the technology independently.
For CCA’s Grose — who has said that on-demand manufacturing offers potential for fashion to transform its business model — it’s not the technology itself that she’s opposed to in the Amazon Style announcement, but the purpose for which it seems likely to be applied: “Could Amazon technology be applied to speeding the sorting of old garments for resale, to keep already extracted materials in circulation for longer?”
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