The Deane Journey

Corey Mulligan wasn't ever what you'd call an eco-warrior. But the journey Deane Apparel is on has turned him from someone who understands environmental issues into a sustainability advocate, always looking over the horizon for the next opportunity to green the business.

Mulligan, Deane's General Manager, says the journey began at a workwear trade show in Birmingham in 2009. "What we saw there was that our counterparts in Europe were moving towards sustainable fabrics and towards the policies and documentation underpinning corporate social responsibility generally," he says. "They were streets ahead of the industry in New Zealand."

That was a bit of an epiphany. Back in Deane's New Zealand headquarters, Mulligan put the company on the road to a CSR strategy of its own. It began with initiatives like Workplace Codes of Conduct that Deane asked its suppliers to sign up to. Over time, the strategy gained momentum.

"We became aware of a push towards CSR values from both within the company and from customers," Mulligan explains. "A small group of staff became increasingly passionate about sustainability and promoted it internally. At the same time, our major customers started asking questions about the working conditions in our factories. Around 2017, slave labour was becoming a prominent issue; they had legitimate concerns about the risks to their brands."

Deane's response was a first for the sector in New Zealand. It worked back through the supply chain and required all of its manufacturers to be certified to Workplace Conditions Assessments (WCA).

"That's where we got collaborative with customers and suppliers," Mulligan says. "We committed time and cost to auditing fabrics, changing our packaging and negotiating with the mills to produce new textiles to our own specifications. We found yarns that used New Zealand wool rather than synthetics and corn starch instead of Lycra and asked the mills to blend them.

"Those new fabrics all took a while, as you can imagine. The mills had to get their technical people onto the case and then create samples we could take to our customers. But we had a unique luxury: our buying power with the mills and relationships with them that go back, in some cases, 30 years. That all adds up to leverage." With 13 sustainable options in the Deane textile library, Mulligan says the company now has the beginnings of an offering that resonates with more and more customers.

"We're seeing a shift amongst them, not just the biggest ones," he says.

"They're moving from talking about doing the right thing to asking us to help them do the right thing. That's a really satisfying part of the journey: we have enduring relationships with our customers, and there's a real willingness on both sides to lift our game." Mulligan says the sustainability journey changes the relationships Deane has with its customers. "In many cases, we're now having values-based conversations rather than purely talking about price and delivery. We realised on the way that we need to do a better job of articulating our sustainability strategy because customers do want to understand it."

There's still plenty to do. The next step is sustainability at scale – the mainstream adoption of sustainable fabrics, textile recycling, a low-carbon supply chain and more. From Mulligan's point of view, the Deane team is well up for it. "The great thing is how personally invested our staff are in something that could easily be just another strategy handed down from management," he says. "It does feel like a journey we're taking together."