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Interview with Kindley Walsh-Lawlor, Senior Director of Social Responsibility and Environmental Affairs with Gap Inc.
If you’re ever shopping for a new article of clothing at Gap, Banana Republic or Old Navy (all brands owned by parent company Gap Inc.), on the way to the cash register you may be wondering in the back of your mind how much progress the company is making toward reducing the environmental impact of the clothing you just purchased.
With the sheer size of Gap Inc., moving toward sustainability is a huge task, but even small changes can make a large impact. Banana Republic started communicating about its sustainability efforts last spring with the tagline “Greener. One step at a time.” In this interview, Kindley Walsh-Lawlor, Senior Director of Social Responsibility and Environmental Affairs with Gap Inc., shares her insights into Gap Inc.’s next steps in their journey toward sustainability.
INTERVIEW HIGHLIGHTS
- Kindley’s personal path to becoming a sustainability leader inside a large corporation
- How Gap Inc.’s environmental initiatives layers on and connects with its social responsibility practices
- An overview of Gap Inc.’s ECO-strategy
- Insights on how to best communicate environmental initiatives to customers
- One reason why marketing Gap Inc.’s “green initiatives” to customers is difficult - most of Gap Inc.’s sustainability practices are behind the scenes and not glamorous
TRANSCRIPT
AMIE VACCARO, GREEN BUSINESS INNOVATORS: I am here today with Kindley Walsh-Lawlor, Senior Director of Social Responsibility and Environmental Affairs with Gap Inc. Kindley, do you want to briefly introduce yourself?
KINDLEY WALSH-LAWLOR: Sure, Hi good morning. I’m Kindley and I work in Gap Inc. Social Responsibility and Environmental Affairs. I’ve been with the company about 11 years, but in this space only for about 18 months. I had the opportunity to work at two of our brands, Banana Republic and Gap for the first 9 years at the company, which gave me a great education on what the brands were up against and what kinds of challenges they face day-to-day especially as we dig deeper with the brands on operational, sustainability, opportunities to redesign product, etc. So it’s been a great thing to bring into this role.
GREEN BUSINESS INNOVATORS: And will you tell us a little bit about your background, and how you got to Gap or Gap brands in the first place?
KINDLEY WALSH-LAWLOR: Sure. I actually grew up on a farm in Vermont. I’m sort of an old-time hippie, long time environmentalist from that perspective. We grew everything that we ate, and/or we bartered for eggs and milk from down the road. I think that was a great way of sort of starting my life really, literally, and then I chose to go to New York City. I did the polar opposite and went to design school. I went to FIT, and thought that I’d stay in New York forever and be apart of this very glamorous lifestyle. And what I realized was I missed the outdoors, I missed the connection point back.
And so some of my first design jobs and ultimately production jobs, which is what I did for about 15 years, were working with ski companies. And then I branched into snowboard to try to be a little fresher and understand sort of my age group at the time and really fell in love with the outdoor industry in general. And then ultimately wanted the opportunity 11 years ago to work for a big company to understand what was the difference when you traveled globally and worked with sewing factories around the world when you had brand names behind you, versus someone new that was a startup. I had the chance to do it in the smaller capacity and now I’ve had the chance to be with the bigger names and see the differences.
GREEN BUSINESS INNOVATORS: That’s great. And where do you see yourself in 10 years?
KINDLEY WALSH-LAWLOR: In 10 years, outside of being an activist in some way, whether it’s for a company or for a smaller group… I think that’s something that’s really important to me. I think being able to express what you believe in, regardless of where you’re working. I think one of the most interesting things for me is that sitting at a big company, you have this opportunity to take this passionate thing that you believe in and actually make it a part of a company’s day-to-day. And I think that’s been the most exciting thing for me.
When I was sitting at Gap brand, where I was for over 4 years in production, I actually volunteered myself to the Social Responsibility Department and said, how can I offer you some insight from the brand perspective, and then vice-versa, how do you help me understand ramifications of my decision making? And a lot of that was focused, at that point, on ethical and social issues at the factory level, and then grew to include sustainability issues and ultimately turned into a full-time job. I’m really fortunate that that’s the path that was created in a sense by being here for all these years.
GREEN BUSINESS INNOVATORS: So are you the first person to sit in this capacity at Gap?
KINDLEY WALSH-LAWLOR: I’m not the first person, but I’m the first person to come from the brands in this capacity. We’ve taken one person out of a marketing team in the past, and she became in a sense the first PR person for Social Responsibility internally. I think a lot of people who sit within the company have a lot to learn still about the fact that we’ve been engaged in ethical sourcing for a dozen years. And what we’re taking now is this foundation of human rights, this foundation of the social piece of it, and we’re layering on the environmental piece. It’s about more than health and safety in the work place in our factories. It’s about more than denim laundry, clean water programs that we’ve been doing for multiple years. It’s about creating a full strategy and actually implementing it, first at the corporate level.
Mill sustainability, mall recycling, Fresno solar, where we’re installing in the next few weeks on our distribution center and making it applicable to the brands; bringing them along for the journey. And that’s something that we’ve been really proud of, and we’ve labeled it the “Eco”-strategy so that it’s an easy conversation to have. E for energy, C for cotton or sustainable design, and O for output or waste. And it’s quick, it’s easy to remember, it’s fundamentally the basics that we need to engage in as an apparel company. So nothing revolutionary with it, it was just a way to harness all of these amazing things we were already doing at the corporate level. And a way then to harness all of these amazing grass roots stories that the brand team members were already doing, and give them greater purpose.
GREEN BUSINESS INNOVATORS: That’s great. Can you tell us a little bit about when and how the Eco-strategy kind of evolved and what it came from?
KINDLEY WALSH-LAWLOR: Sure. A couple of hours at Starbucks, myself and our SVP, I think we really started to look at some of the great work that had been done for all of these years linking it back to the social piece of it. Because it’s very important to us we’re not separating them, saying okay we founded this group based on this ethical sourcing piece of it. We always had the environmental piece connected, but now we want to take it bigger. And so what we did was we looked at a couple of key things we were working on at the time. One of them was this clean water program that we sort of bucket into the waste piece, where our water that goes into our denim laundries is now cleaned before it’s released into the local communities. And often times is cleaner, when it’s released than when it first came in. So in a sense you’ve got social and environmental benefit because you’re taking care of the people who are making your product.
We looked at things like the fact that we were chair on Better Cotton Initiatives Steering Committee for two years, and then are now still one of four brands who are sitting on the Steering Committee, which is really an area focused on this cotton/sustainable-design piece around the world, that goes from field to consumer and focuses on labor issues and environmental issues. We started to look at examples like that and say, well, obviously it’s about energy. We know our distribution centers have done extensive relighting in all their owned and operating facilities, not just to save money, but to be more socially and environmentally aware. We knew this VCI was a piece of the sustainable design bucket. And then of course, how we’re taking care of water, what we’re doing with malls and how we’re encouraging them to begin recycling more and more as we look around the country. And we said Eco makes perfect sense.
So when we harness that, we first publicly released it in our report last year, the beginning of last year, and really it’s been the way that we’ve had all of our brand conversations since then. It wasn’t that we weren’t doing things with the brands; it wasn’t that the brands weren’t already doing sustainable design or more sustainable product, they were just never talking about it, and they were never taking it further. I think one of the things that got us really excited was when we first released the Eco-strategy, and we put together and internal sustainable design toolkit, and gave that out to the brands.
It was Banana Republic first who said to us, we want to go green. We’ve done these things in the past, but we don’t know how to take it further, and that was a great opportunity for us to step in and say Ah-Ha! Here’s a sustainable design toolkit! Which P.S. is not just about organic, it’s about all kinds of different fibers, all different processes from washed to dye stuff, to silk screens, to a variety of other ways of approaching this kind of design. How much water do you use when you wash your product? Why are you using so much? If you’re cleaning the toxins out, don’t you want to clean toxins out of lesser gallons? All of this kind of approach, and ultimately, what we did was spend a really intense year with Banana to say, alright, let’s start with the heart of what makes you guys tick, which is your product. But then you’ve got to bring us into a lot of other areas.
Packaging became a natural evolution. What are the shopping bags made of? Are they recyclable? Now the answer is yes. Not just reusable, but also recyclable. How much paper products are you also putting onto any of the apparel that ships? Why are you putting an extra hang tag to tell the green story, it makes no sense. Stamp it inside the back neck. Make it clear to the customer it’s about less waste. It’s about less paper. It’s about all of those things. And then, what we’ve taken on since then is really going to the store operations level. How are the stores being designed? What materials are being used? What’s happening in the backrooms with all of that waste, etc.? So we really saw it become an evolutionary story, and it all started because a couple of designers and a couple of merchandisers wanted to do something that was more sustainable.
GREEN BUSINESS INNOVATORS: And can you tell us a little bit about what some of the other brands are doing environmentally and where things are headed for Gap, Banana Republic and your other brands?
KINDLEY WALSH-LAWLOR: Yeah. And I wish I could tell you by name, but there are a couple of things that have started that are not yet released. So one of our other big three brands, so we’ve got Banana, who we already talked about, we’ve got Gap, and we’ve got Old Navy, and then we have our outlet stores. One of the other big of the three has just kicked off a sustainability initiative that is different then what Banana did. So what I love is, we’re going to leverage these learnings off each other and really create a more holistic approach to how we do sustainability at the company in general. But this other brand, which I could talk sooner than later, I’m sure is really focused sustainability being one of their five key pillars as to how they make all decisions in their business. So they’ve gone after it as a cultural shift to insure that’s about more than just pleasing the customer, more than just getting the right aesthetic in the store, more than just engaging employees, but also doing the right thing when they’re doing business.
Again, this brand has done a lot of great things. They also sit on the strong foundation of ethical sourcing, but at the same time they now are making a conscious effort, a conscious decision to teach everybody in the brand to the store level, which is a huge statement when you talk about 150,000 employees across Gap Inc., many of them part-time sitting in our stores. But to go out and get that message out to say, we know this is important to you, here’s what we’ve already done, and here’s how much further we’re going to take it. That, I think, is one of the most exciting moments we’re in, and that’s where I’m spending the majority of the rest of my day, thus my vote for the environment T-shirt that I have on today. But just to start teaching people more about what they can do in their day-to-day.
GREEN BUSINESS INNOVATORS: Absolutely. And where do you see all this work culminating? Where do you see Gap and the Gap brands 10 years from now?
KINDLEY WALSH-LAWLOR: I think I look forward, a little less, a little less time. So in two to three years, I think I would like to see all of the brands having created a very authentic story about what they’ve done from a sustainability standpoint. So not that they’ve created marketing messages only, not that their goal was to create consumer facing messages, but that their goal was to create more sustainable practices. Some of that will be consumer facing, like the product and the packaging, but most of it’s going to be behind the scenes, and I think that’s where people don’t understand that not all of this is glamorous, not all of this is marketable.
This is really just again fundamentally what we need to do, and what we’ve started to do. It just needs to get broader. It needs to get bigger. It needs to get more important, and I already see that shift has changed, and has happened. So I look two to three years out, and I want to look at all of our brands and see something that we are all proud to be associated with. Again, whether you’re a customer who is choosing to by a t-shirt from us because of our sustainability practices on the product or you’re an employee who’s proud to talk about what the company has done from a social standpoint, from an environmental standpoint. So that’s my short-term goal.
GREEN BUSINESS INNOVATORS: So it does sound like, and it’s clear that a lot of things happen behind the scenes, what does Gap do compared to its peers that makes it unique environmentally and socially?
KINDLEY WALSH-LAWLOR: I think what allows us to be unique is, again, that foundation of the ethical sourcing. Levi’s was the first company to write a code of vendor conduct that was about human rights. We were the first one to put vendor compliance officers in every country where we were working to insure that our factory employees were being treated fairly and appropriately around the world. And I think what’s interesting is taking that foundation of the social and insuring there is never a disconnect is something that is a little bit different. I think what I see a lot of companies do and some of them are doing it beautifully is they’re either about sustainability or they’re about social and ethical sourcing or social and human rights. And so what I want to do is insure that whatever we’re doing is connected. I want to insure that whatever we’re messaging is connected, and I think that’s something that is a differentiator and hugely important for the company.
GREEN BUSINESS INNOVATORS: Absolutely. How dedicated is Gap as a whole to all these issues and how many people are working on these projects and are behind you?
KINDLEY WALSH-LAWLOR: The answer to how many people grows everyday. I think as we engage the brands, we make ourselves that much more powerful as a department. We have the majority of our people in social responsibility and environmental affairs sitting in-country working on both social and environmental issues at the factory level, at the mill level, sometimes working with local governments where they’re living and where they are from. But really what we see is this momentum is building. So we’re basically creating ambassadors at the brand level and ambassadors at the store level; people who are passing the message along, insuring that what we’re asking for is happening. How invested is the company? Every CEO I’ve ever heard has said this is a key component as regarding who this company is. This is the foundation of who this company is. And for 12 years plus we’ve been about the social and human rights. For even longer we’ve been, and the family themselves, the Fishers have been about philanthropy and giving back to the community, and that was a core piece of how they even founded this company almost 40 years ago. So I think it’s nice to know it’s an authentic message coming again from 1969 from Don and Doris, and I think that’s huge.
GREEN BUSINESS INNOVATORS: Absolutely. Can you tell us about a time when there was some sort of obstacle or challenge that you encountered either within Gap or without, that you overcame?
KINDLEY WALSH-LAWLOR: Yeah, everyday. Really the answer is everyday. I think it’s important for us sitting at the corporate level, in environment, in social responsibility to not only understand what’s happening with our competitors or fellow brands that we work with, or the state of the world and what’s happening across every country that we work in, but also hugely important that we understand the nuances of what’s happening in each of our brands that we know their customer as well as they do, that we’re able to speak to issues per brand in different ways. That’s a huge challenge.
It takes a lot of time to understand that, it’s a lot of time to change the hat that you’re wearing in a sense, when you sit with Gap and talk about one thing and then go to Banana have the same conversation, but with a different filter. I think as we become more skilled at understanding what customers are looking for at each brand. Then that’s hugely important for us to engage that way. Basic, everyone wants to see you ROI on every initiative that you’re doing. What we do is we come up with really creative ways to be cost neutral. We look at where we do have to invest the money and by talking about when they’re going to see return on investment, that’s when they start to get the buying on the more expensive items. So you weigh them with the creative approach, the cost neutral approach, the approach that’s going to give you ROI, and that’s the reality of anyone who’s engaging in this work.
GREEN BUSINESS INNOVATORS: Is there anything that you have tried since you’ve been at Gap or in this position in particular that’s failed? And that you’ve learned something from?
KINDLEY WALSH-LAWLOR: I think again, I walked into this role where I’m sitting today almost two years ago from Gap Brand. So certainly the way I thought was more Gap-oriented, I think going back to that customer piece. And when we started to sit with Banana, I learned really quickly that I had to get much more familiar with who Banana was as a brand. I’d been there five years before, but I hadn’t been there for that many years as well. I needed to understand what they were going after, what kind of messaging they’d put out there for the last few years and how they wanted to talk about sustainability was incredibly important. We were giving them a lot of guidance on it, but again I think when you first approach it with sort of blazing ideas and then realized it really was pulling back and talking about being incremental and changing things incrementally. And part of that was me realizing too, we wanted to put the same authentic transparent story out there that we did with the social and the human rights piece of it. I would say I had to slow myself down and that was something that I had to learn very quickly.
GREEN BUSINESS INNOVATORS: What is your sense for the kind of impact that Gap and the Gap brands have been having?
KINDLEY WALSH-LAWLOR: I think our impact will be enormous because of the sheer size of our brands. And so what I think is really amazing about that is when we do something small, and I say “small” and I use it sort of with quotations because one example is we changed all of our brands paper price tickets to be 100 percent post consumer recycled paper almost a year ago. That’s every brand. It saves so much paper as you look across how many units we buy every season, everyday, that are shipping around the world. It just gives an indicator of the scale we have when we, not only do it by brand, but leverage our brands. We come up with one idea and suddenly it’s something that everyone is adopting. I think, that’s what I think is so incredible. So even though it feels small when one group comes up with the idea, now we’re into recycled plastic gift cards and that will be in every brand store for holiday this year. We tested it at One Brand last year. Those are the kinds of things that have enormous ramifications, positive ramifications as you roll it out and leverage the brands. That’s a huge area we’ve been focusing on. We meet monthly with people from store design, people form packaging, people from design to insure that there’s a lot of these shared stories so that they are working off of each other.
GREEN BUSINESS INNOVATORS: And it seems like there’s a lot to be excited about. What keeps you inspired day-to-day and what’s your favorite part of the job?
KINDLEY WALSH-LAWLOR: That I get to come to work every day and do what I believe in. I think that’s ultimately my favorite thing. I feel proud to come here and do this work. I feel proud to go home and tell my family about what I did. And I don’t think that everybody has that opportunity to come and do something that they believe in to the core, and to bring people along for the journey and get them excited about it. I love to inspire people and get them to think differently. And they all get there at their own speed. They all get there in their own way, but I’m fine to give them fun facts to make them think differently and that’s something that I enjoy doing a lot.
GREEN BUSINESS INNOVATORS: And which part of the job interests you and excites you most? Which issues are your core issues, personally?
KINDLEY WALSH-LAWLOR: I think the product. I mean, I’m a product girl. I was a designer to start with and then I did production for 15 years. I could open up a jacket and tell you probably everything about how that thing was made and how long it took, and why those trims and fabrics were chosen, and so to say now, that we can do it in a more sustainable way, that actually cares for our environment, I think is a really beautiful chance. I still love that part of it. I love diving into it, but at the same time I’ve got to balance that out with the operational side, which gives you enormous rewards very quickly because of the sheer volume of what you’re trying to change as well.
GREEN BUSINESS INNOVATORS: And what keeps you up at night?
KINDLEY WALSH-LAWLOR: That this is my full-time job and not anyone else’s. I think one of the most difficult things that we face is the economy is tough. What the world is going through right now is tough. It doesn’t leave a lot of excess dollars for people to spend on apparel, and so our businesses struggle. I think when you look at that, people are deeply focused on what their own full-time jobs are. And I can talk about this all day, everyday because it’s my full-time job, but how do I make it applicable to the moment and time that we’re in as a world, in a sense? And bring the brands and other people who I’m working with along on that same journey when they have so many other things that they have to fix or so many other things that they have to deal with. That keeps me up at night. I think by inspiring as much as we can as a team and making it personal for them, it helps. And that’s how we engage them and get them thinking differently.
GREEN BUSINESS INNOVATORS: What other companies in the area do you see as kind of pioneers in the Eco-fashion space and do you see Gap, you just acquired a company yesterday, do you see Gap kind of moving further into the acquisitions there?
KINDLEY WALSH-LAWLOR: I don’t know much about acquisitions, I must say. I was thrilled to see that we purchased Athleta yesterday. I think they have a nice social program. We’ll dive deeper on what they’re doing from a sustainability standpoint obviously, once we get to know them. I think, are we leaders right now in the environment? The answer is no. I think, is it a goal? Yeah. We want to get out there and we want to make a difference. And I think that’s the key thing that’s so important to us is it’s about really making a positive impact versus just creating a great story, or talking about our brands in a way that’s not authentic. It’s just not who we are, and so it’s really important to us that we work as hard as we need to, to get something happening.
I look at people like Patagonia and Nike who aren’t necessarily bay area companies, but who’ve spent years refining their sustainability approach on product, specifically on the product. I think both of those companies have done incredible work. With Patagonia, making a statement years ago by “X year” they would be all organic cotton. Nike has done their materiality assessment. They’ve done incredible work by making statements by “X dates,” footwear, apparel and finally gear will be “X %” sustainable. I think those are the kinds of lofty goals I want to see us go after at some point, but it takes time. It’s really, truly that path that we’re on. Again, we’re leveraging off of the great ethical sourcing, the great social side of things, which helps us and pushes us a little further, a little faster. But no we are not the leaders yet, and we’re working hard to be that. But overall we’re looking for that, that sea change in the industry that we can help propel that. That when we look at people like Nike and Patagonia, we’re partnering with them to help move mills to think differently, to help factories think differently and ultimately the product to be made differently.
GREEN BUSINESS INNOVATORS: Do you benchmark with companies like Patagonia and Nike and kind of use ideas that they’ve used and learn from each other?
KINDLEY WALSH-LAWLOR: We leverage each other a lot in multi-brand initiatives, so we’ll work together on work like clean water program that we did with Levis, like mill sustainability that we’re doing right now, specifically with Nike and with Wal-Mart. We’ll leverage brands to say we’re more powerful if we go after the same requests in the same places together. And that’s something that we do. Are we benchmarking? I think there’s healthy competition. We’re open to sharing those learnings when we sit in these multi-brand initiatives together, and I think that’s really positive. We do care for each other, we are looking out for each other, and I think that’s enormously important as well.
GREEN BUSINESS INNOVATORS: Absolutely. And is there anything that you’ve learned from your customers in particular that’s been interesting or kind of really impactful over the years?
KINDLEY WALSH-LAWLOR: Yeah. I think it’s very clear that all of our customers whether you’re talking about an Old Navy, a Banana or a Gap customer, care about social and environmental issues. It doesn’t matter where they live. It doesn’t matter how they vote. It matters to them that they are doing the right thing, but it needs to be easy. For them it needs to be easy. That message can’t be too detailed, it can’t be too convoluted, it can’t tell too many stories, and that was something, again, that we really tested when we went out with Banana and said it’s about greener, period, one step at a time, period. Right. It’s this incremental thing that we’re doing along with you. I think the other thing that I’ve recently been hearing a lot more about customers is they’re weary about how much change they actually make when they do the right thing when it comes to the environment. They want businesses to own a lot of this. And you know, that’s something we need to keep in mind as we move this work forward.
GREEN BUSINESS INNOVATORS: Are there any kind of developments that are happening or any other final thoughts you’d like to share with our audience?
KINDLEY WALSH-LAWLOR: No, I think we’re in a real continual moment of change when it comes to sustainability, and I think it almost doesn’t matter what sector you’re in. It doesn’t matter what product you make or what you’re out there doing. There are just small things that everybody can do that make an enormous difference. And as you start to leverage it against a person who you may teach or another brand that you may inspire, it all creates benefit. It all creates environmental and social benefit, and I think that’s a key message that I’d like to pass around as I have these conversations.
GREEN BUSINESS INNOVATORS: Thank you so much, Kindley.
KINDLEY WALSH-LAWLOR: Thanks.
October 28th, 2008 at 11:53 pm
[...] October 28, 2008 Interview with Kindley Walsh-Lawlor, Senior Director of Social Responsibility and Environmental Affairs with Gap Inc. Posted by ecofrenzy under Interview piece | Tags: clothing, sustainable, Gap, brand, Kindley Walsh-Lawlor, podcast, retail, green clothing | Listen to the podcast or read the full transcript here. [...]
November 26th, 2008 at 1:07 pm
[...] Gap Inc is in extremely capable hands with Kindley, and I look forward to seeing how she continues to drive environmental and social change in the industry. Overall, Kindley is looking for “that sea change in the industry that we can help propel” and to partner with other industry leaders like Nike and Patagonia to “help move mills to think differently, to help factories to think differently and ultimately for the product to be made differently.” Read full transcript and listen to the audio of my interview here. [...]
December 1st, 2008 at 2:26 pm
[...] Gap Inc., shared her insights into the company’s future journey towards sustainability with Green Business Innovators (via Triple [...]
December 7th, 2008 at 6:05 pm
[...] an additional interview with Kindley, please see this interview by Green Business Innovators. Share with: [...]
December 23rd, 2008 at 1:52 pm
[...] Gap Inc is in extremely capable hands with Kindley, and I look forward to seeing how she continues to drive environmental and social change in the industry. Overall, Kindley is looking for “that sea change in the industry that we can help propel” and to partner with other industry leaders like Nike and Patagonia to “help move mills to think differently, to help factories to think differently and ultimately for the product to be made differently.” Read full transcript and listen to the audio of my interview here. [...]