We meet for a pixelated face-to-face on a concerningly warm Monday in May, Zoom-ing between Copenhagen and Carcassonne. Nicolaj Reffstrup wears his seemingly signature Ciele visor, and sips a green juice from a cup branded in pink by Denmark’s own Joe & The Juice. I recognise its colour, it’s my favourite: cucumber, pineapple and lemon, or the ‘Prince of Green’, as Joe calls it. I find this quite amusing, given the nature of our conversation. As Co-Founder of GANNI, a brand so active in its sustainable efforts in an industry that is typically threatened by conversation surrounding doing better, the Prince of Green feels like an appropriate title for Nicolaj.
The Denmark-fathomed and globally-appreciated fashion brand, GANNI, at the helm of husband-wife creative duo, Ditte and Nicolaj Reffstrup, makes no claims to being a sustainable one. And, for all intents and purposes, as a phenomenon that thrives on newness and is dependent on consumption and ever-morphing trend culture, it’s not. But GANNI is solution driven. Through ambitious initiatives such as successfully phasing out virgin leather by 2023, pledging to cut carbon emissions in half by 2027 in absolute terms (from a 2021 baseline), and the introduction of GANNI Lab and Fabrics of the Future, the B Corp certified label is doing pretty well at setting precedent for the rest of the fashion industry.
What is GANNI’s secret to sustainable success? There is no secret. GANNI is willing to share. In fact, it’s doing exactly that with the upcoming release of The GANNI Playbook, collaboratively written by Nicolaj and sustainability writer/consultant Brooke Roberts-Islam. Published by Penguin, The GANNI Playbook tells the story of the brand’s evolution while providing an open-source toolkit for cleaner operations in an effort to improve the economic ecosystem. In short, it’s the GANNI guide to responsible business.
The Reffstrups took over GANNI in 2007, transforming it from a local cashmere line into the international sensation that epitomises Scandi style. “My wife [Ditte Reffstrup] had the vision. She was extremely creative and yet commercial,” Nicolaj tells me. “And I knew how to run a tech company. Together we were driven by the challenge of turning GANNI into an international business.” And that they did. Nicolaj stepped down as CEO in 2018 to focus on environmental and ethical responsibility at GANNI and the foundation of his climate tech-oriented venture capital firm, Look Up Ventures.
The responsibility team at GANNI is refreshingly rigorous. Led by Chief Sustainability Officer Lauren Bartley, it is divided into different departments (it even has a ‘carbon squad’) and works around a matrix with education, accountability and action at its core. “At one axis we have impact and at the other awareness,” Nicolaj tells me.
“We might do a project that is low on impact but high on awareness. For instance, we brew beer from hops grown in our office garden and oyster mushrooms from our spent coffee grains from the espresso machine. This is a great tool for education but it has minimal real impact. That being said, through it we try to teach people about circularity and increase awareness of the small things that can be done to make a difference.”
“Then, you have activities that might be less interesting on social media but are high impact, such as installing solar panels with our Portuguese suppliers or biodiversification and carbon insetting plans.”
As it stands, a climate-positive collection remains the dream. GANNI faces many logistical hurdles in its bid to do better by the environment. “Until then, we cannot make claims to being a sustainable company but that is the ultimate goal,” says Nicolaj.
GANNI is committed to progress over perfection, for actions speak louder than words. Each year, the brand releases a candid annual responsibility report. Alongside this, GANNI updates its Game Plan with objectives and strategies for actualising its vision. In the Game Plan 2.0, the GANNI team mapped out the brand’s carbon footprint measurements, intensifying the focus on decarbonisation with the goal of a 50% reduction of absolute emissions by 2027 from a 2021 baseline. The nature of a business is growth and gain, thus to succeed here, decoupling emissions from growth is essential. “Our data shows an annual growth of 18% since 2021, and in that same period, we’ve managed to get our carbon footprint down by 7%,” he shares. This is a big deal and a great start.
I probe him slightly. Data suggests GANNI’s emissions actually increased between 2021 and 2022. He responds: “They did, you’re right but actually they fell more substantially between 2022 to 2023, resulting in the 7% drop we’ve seen in absolute terms.” The reason for this is because the impact from launched initiatives had not yet taken effect, he tells me. “This year, we’re starting to see the impact of us having phased out virgin leather, for example, and for the introduction of better materials. So when we report on 2024, I’m hoping it will be even better.”
“Can you do it? Is achieving a 50% reduction in carbon emissions by 2027 really possible?” I ask, admittedly slightly pessimistic but nonetheless impressed and hugely hopeful. If GANNI can accomplish something so bold in such a timeframe, there’s little reason as to why other corporations can’t. The bar is high and the intention is bang on. “I don’t know, if I’m totally honest. We’ve got a long way to go but we’re on the right track.” As the saying goes: honesty is the best policy, and this is a policy that GANNI is wholeheartedly committed to.
The largest source of emissions are materials. “We’ve been very aware of this for many years, which is why we phased out virgin leather. We’ve also converted to recycled polyester but the thing with this is that many rPETs can only be recycled once, so now we’re trying to find a textile-to-textile polyester recycling technology that we can hopefully implement.” Excessive water consumption and concentrated farming practices resulting in soil degradation mean even organic cotton is a problem material. “To the extent possible we use recycled cotton but this doesn’t cover all of our needs.” It’s a patchwork on which you’ve got to start somewhere. GANNI has.
In 2019, the company launched the ‘Fabrics of the Future’ initiative to research, test and scale innovative materials that challenge conventional ones. This initiative is behind exciting, though some not yet commercially available, collaborations with biomaterial innovators including Polybion, Modern Synthesis and BioFluff.
And when it comes to collaboration, conversation is key. GANNI’s design team is trained in circular practice, further harnessing an environment where the entire team adheres to the sustainable agenda. The initiative provides a space for conversation between the GANNI design team and material makers, supporting a liaison and consultancy, if you will, for material qualities, performance and durability.
At times their dedication has necessitated great sacrifice, Nicolaj tells me. “We had two colourways of cowboy boots made from a material that we couldn’t find a better alternative for, so we ended up having to phase them out. They were worth 2.4 million DKK in sales.”
“Often people ask: ’What does it cost?’ But it’s not just money, it’s sacrifice. That’s the real kind of investment you’re making.”
Nicolaj has observed a changing attitude in the fashion industry but he remains frustrated by hindrance. “I notice that people, at the Global Fashion Summit for example, have good intentions, but they are stuck waiting for others to start doing the right thing. It stifles a lot of progress and means that it’s a waiting game in which there is so much inertia. And I’m not saying we’re right at GANNI, there have been moments where we’ve failed – we once did a compostable rubber boot that was so compostable it leaked… not our proudest moment – but we’d absolutely rather be doing it and learning along the way, right?”
This fearlessness of failure forms the foundations of GANNI’s promise for ‘progress over perfection’. “We’ve tried and are trying lots of different approaches, some of which we’re yet to see at scale. We’ve tried rental, we’ve tried re-commerce and take back schemes in various shapes and forms, which work in some places and less so in others. We do repair shops and pop ups with companies like SOJO. It’s a real challenge. Not everything will take,” he tells me.
Nicolaj does not deem this as failure, but rather as the coagulation of new competences. “In failure, new ecosystems are created where knowledge and experience aggregate. And from this, successful concepts begin to stand on the shoulders of ones that failed.”
Nicolaj’s background in tech has equipped him with the insight necessary for driving key investment at Look Up Ventures. “A lot of the tech that we invest in at Look Up, we trial at GANNI,” he tells me. GANNI is the guinea pig in a cute pair of embroidered cowboy boots. “It might be traceability platforms, compliance platforms, circular business concepts, maybe innovative materials or recycling technologies. So it’s quite a unique position to be in, where I’ve benefited from my own history in tech which Look Up then benefits from but GANNI then benefits from too.”
It is possible to be too far ahead of the curve as well. A concept might fail because the demand is simply not there. Alternatively, an audience might want something that a corporation cannot yet provide logistically. It’s a too-and-fro; a dance with a lot of footwork, one that’ll take much trial and error – and a great deal of practice – to learn.
If the demand doesn’t yet exist and the financial incentive is not there, why do it? I wonder. Well, obligation, for one, of which there are different sorts. It appears to me as though obligation at GANNI is of the moral sort rather than out of necessity for continued corporate success in a changing world.
“I’ve been through this hundreds of times in my head. My background isn’t in fashion and I could leave quite easily. But you always end up with the same kind of thinking – and most people appreciate Capitalism. If we were to do something drastic and revolutionary like shut down GANNI, it would have zero impact. Somebody else would take over the market share, and they might not have such a focus on doing better from a planetary perspective. So, then, it’s better to keep hold of the market share for as long as we are working towards finding sustainable solutions. And moreover, the second there is a financial lull, investment stops, and unfortunately this includes anything that pertains to sustainability, I’ve seen it first hand. There is no time for revolution.”
Nicolaj tells me he first came across Game Theory, the mathematically modelled description of human interaction, while studying Economics and Philosophy at university. While he finds it hugely interesting, and has likely applied it himself at times, he finds it equally terrifying. “We’re short sighted, acting on immediate gratification – even if the overall outcome is harmful.” And materiality has become deeply intertwined within this. In many ways, it’s overthrown. “I don’t see us overcoming this unless we take more responsibility, which is not always easy nor is it comfortable.” This would first require our acceptance of the state of today.
“Our ability to ignore the facts, this confirmation bias, blows my mind. The evidence is all there. I’ve seen risk maps that show parts of the US will be uninhabitable by 2035, but we’re not talking about it.” I’m reminded of ‘Don’t Look Up’, the parodic Netflix film about two astronomers who try to warn a distracted and impartial world about an approaching comet that will wipe out life on earth, which is, humorously, the polar opposite in name to Look Up Ventures.
“I never understood why there wasn’t more cooperation between different corporations and industries and why we don’t work together more.” This is the sentiment behind The GANNI Playbook. “The book isn’t rocket science, but it’s our contribution towards a larger degree of openness, a recipe for the groundwork that is necessary to build something better for anyone to copy, reiterate or improve.”