What challenges and strategies are top of mind for you in sustainable business?
The challenge I keep returning to is the gap between commitment and practice, and how easily that gap becomes a chasm when political winds shift. Companies that built genuine sustainability strategies are navigating a moment where voluntary commitments on DEI and climate have become politically contested, and the institutional consensus that underpinned them has frayed.
The ESG backlash is real, but worth being precise about. Some of what’s retreating deserved scrutiny: commitments made without the operational infrastructure to back them up, goals set for signaling rather than impact. What concerns me is when substantive progress gets abandoned alongside the performative variety. Because the costs of backsliding are not abstract. They fall disproportionately on women who power global supply chains, who are both on the frontlines of human rights abuses and the first to lose their livelihoods when floods, heat waves, and climate disasters strike. They are not a footnote to this story. They are the reason it matters.
My view is that this moment actually clarifies the opportunity for private sector leadership. As governments backslide on climate and labor commitments, companies that stay the course build resilience, secure supply chains, and attract the talent and capital that will define the next decade. Human rights due diligence, done properly, is an opportunity to understand whose lives are shaped by business decisions and build strategy around that knowledge. The companies that do this well don’t just manage risk better. They make better decisions.
What should we be doing differently today?
We need to stop treating regulatory compliance as our final destination. Forced labor has moved from being a human rights concern at the margins of trade policy to a question of economic competition at its center. Section 301 investigations, import bans, and the EU Forced Labour Regulation coming into effect in 2027 mean that plausible deniability in corporate supply chains is no longer viable. The companies that will lead are the ones asking not just how to comply, but how to get ahead of what’s coming.
I’d also push for a more honest accounting of what intersectionality actually means. Climate and human rights are not separate agendas. The workers most exposed to heat stress, flooding, and climate disruption are the same workers grappling with economic precarity. Companies that treat their environmental and human rights commitments as different workstreams are missing both the point and the opportunity.
And we need a different model of stakeholder engagement: time-bound, goal-focused, and built around genuine accountability between companies, labor, and civil society. We have wasted too much time convening indefinitely without moving the needle.
If you could reset sustainable business, what would you emphasize?
Intersectionality, not as a buzzword but as an operating principle. Social and environmental justice are inseparable, and the companies and initiatives that treat them as such will build something durable. The ones that don’t will keep cycling through commitments that don’t hold.
I’d also emphasize the power of radical collaboration among people who don’t usually share a room. At Remake, we united influencers, creatives, and brand executives with union leaders, legislators, and workers from the ground up, building campaigns grounded in frontline experience rather than constructed on behalf of it. That distinction matters enormously. Solutions that center the people closest to a problem ensure lasting change.
I’d also bring much more urgency to binding accountability rather than voluntary commitments.
WHAT ARE YOU MOST PROUD OF?
When brands cancelled $40 billion in orders at the start of the pandemic, leaving millions of workers without wages overnight, we built #PayUp: a viral campaign that united supermodels, everyday citizens, influencers, and labor advocates around a single demand, and recovered more than $22 billion in cancelled contracts. The California Garment Worker Protection Act came from the same playbook. Passing legislation that established sectoral wage liability and ended the piece-rate pay system enabling endemic wage theft required years of coalition building across constituencies that did not naturally align. It passed. And changed lives.
Earlier in my career, at Business for Social Responsibility and through the ILO and World Bank’s Better Work programme, I built the muscle for this kind of work: convening luxury brands and global retailers including Amazon, Chanel, Gap, Gucci, Levi Strauss, Target, and Walmart around shared problems, and facilitating complex multi-party dialogues. I have facilitated dialogue between governments, unions, suppliers, and global brands on issues as charged as forced labor in Jordanian factories and gender-based violence in Cambodian ones.