For Malin Björne, head of communications at H&M Foundation, scaling up innovation in an industry that favors the status quo requires a combination of what she calls “logic and magic.”
“The logic is the data and the facts,” she said. “But then you have to have magic as well, and that’s the storytelling. And where you have both, I think you have a pretty good shot at getting someone’s attention.”
Björne has been at H&M Foundation, the philanthropic vehicle funded by H&M Group’s founding family, the Perssons, practically since its inception in 2013, so much so that her colleagues joke that she’s part of the inventory.
Related Stories
She was there when the Stockholm-based organization launched the Global Change Award two years later to fill what it saw as a gap in venture funding for early-stage innovation that could create transformative, well, change, if only someone would give them a shot. And she’s been there as the prize has evolved in near-lock-step with the shifting concept of “sustainable fashion” and the environmental and social ideals such a blank palimpsest of a term is expected to encompass.
“I remember when we launched, everyone was talking about closing the loop and recycling; it was very technical, very siloed and you didn’t have a holistic perspective at all,” Björne said. “And then we realized that we have to talk more about making fashion circular, not only through materials but also with business models. But even then, we had a lot of material innovation, because I think that’s what everyone thought was the only form of innovation that could exist.”
Ten years and 10 million euros ($11.5 million) in grants later, the extent to which the Global Change Award has made a difference is something H&M Foundation has been thinking about a great deal.
“We’ve backed 56 teams from 23 countries. That is a lot, but also not a lot,” said Annie Lindmark, H&M Foundation’s innovation program director. “When we launched, there wasn’t a space where early-stage innovation in fashion could be celebrated, and there were fewer investors and brands who were willing to take on ideas that looked a little bit experimental or far from market. So I think it all started with an idea that still stays true today, and which goes back to H&M Foundation’s role: We are a philanthropy. We’re able to take big risks, to be able to bet on the unknown.”
Even at the beginning, H&M Foundation had big ambitions for the Global Change Award, positioning it as the Nobel Prize of fashion. Its inaugural ceremony—and nearly every one that followed—has taken place at Stockholm City Hall, the location of the annual Nobel Prize banquet, with each celebratory dinner in the vaulted Blue Hall ending in the same “dessert parade” of black-and-white-clad waiters waltzing down the grand stairway brandishing sparklers. The first prizes, which included different cash disbursements amounting to 900,000 euros ($1 million) in all, were handed out by Crown Princess Victoria of Sweden, who returned earlier this month for a candlelit anniversary soiree.
Among the initial five-member cohort was a chemical recycler of cotton waste, an online textile marketplace for leftover textiles that would become Reverse Resources and a waste polyester “digester” that the industry would soon know as Ambercycle. All were given entry into a yearlong accelerator run by Accenture and KTH Royal Institute of Technology, a mainstay of the program that has endured where others have changed.
H&M Foundation “knew they couldn’t drive change fully alone, so they wanted to establish a few partnerships that could help them drive the impact they wanted,” said Josefine Olsson, managing director at Accenture, a business and technology consultancy. Now known as the GCA Impact Accelerator, the program bounces around cities like Stockholm, London, Shanghai and New York to coach the “changemakers,” as the participants are known, on different subjects that not only hone their business plans, but also the people behind them.
“It can be idea development, it can be technology acceleration, it can be how to work as to strengthen your leadership skills—many different topics that you need as a changemaker to be able to scale the idea and grow as a person and changemaker,” Olsson said. “It has always been a part of the program to support the changemakers, with connections towards the industry, such as meeting brands and understanding the production part of the supply chain. But one of the magical parts about the program, I think, is how they can help each other, as well, by sharing learnings and experiences with each other.”
While the 250,000-euro ($289,000) infusion certainly helped get Ambercycle off the ground, said Shay Sethi, the L.A.-based firm’s CEO, it was the support network that the Global Change Award that made the biggest difference. Today, the “molecularly regenerated” polyester purveyor, whose product is known as Cycora, has inked offtake deals with big names like Arc’teryx, Ganni, Reformation and, most recently, REI Co-op as it looks to ramp up production in earnest with its first commercial-scale plant. Another highlight of Sethi’s career has been seeing Taylor Swift, one of the world’s biggest pop stars, wearing a Ganni x Cycora jersey-esque dress from Paris Fashion Week featuring the logo of fiancé Travis Kelce’s football team, the Kansas City Chiefs, and the number 13, her signature numeral.
It’s almost difficult for Sethi to imagine that 10 years ago, the idea for Ambercycle was “pretty much just that—an idea.” As recent graduates from the University of California, Davis, he and co-founder Moby Ahmed had some initial lab data but not much in the way of substantial proof, let alone yarn samples or prototypes. For them, the exercise was more intellectual than entrepreneurial.
“We graduated in the summer of 2015, and a couple of months before that, we were talking about all the different problems in the world and found that the small garbage bag of clothing in our closet was a big question: What happens to this material?” Sethi said. “And so that started a whole rabbit hole discussion about, ‘O.K., what is this material? Why does it not get recycled? Why is it ending up in a landfill?’ And so we graduated, and instead of trying to go join the workforce, we just said, ‘Let’s explore this problem for a couple of months.’”
Those months became years after Sethi and Ahmed realized they had something that the industry not only wanted, but needed. When they received H&M Foundation’s check, the amount was “mindboggling,” Sethi said. But more encouraging was the validation.
“It’s the confidence that the Global Change Award imbues on winners by showcasing that, if you can do this very difficult thing, there are actually people who care about it,” he said. “It helped create a foundation to make new connections, grow from there and develop that network.”
Family ties
To be sure, Yayra Agbofah, a social entrepreneur based in Ghana who is one of 10 winners this year, had his doubts about H&M Foundation’s intentions at first.
Agbofah has spent years combatting the scourge of what many in the global South refer to as “waste colonialism,” including the deluge of cheap, disposal clothing that has become an indelible part of the landscape in the capital city of Accra, where castoffs that cannot be resold at the sprawling secondhand Kantamanto Market often end up sailing off into ditches, drains and rivers into the sea, churned up by the seething waves and tossed back onto the coast. His winning concept, The Revival Circularity Lab, would transform this waste into valuable inputs through upcycling, repair and design.
But H&M is responsible for many of the labels strewn on beaches such as Jamestown, where “tentacles” of clothing have become so lodged into the densely packed sand that they require hoes and machetes to dislodge. Would accepting a Global Change Award for his work mean he was getting “in bed with the devil himself”?
“But then after having a series of conversations with H&M Foundation, during which it was made clear that they’re a separate entity on their own, and I got to understand their mission, who they are and what they believe in, that I now understand the distinction between the group and their foundation,” Agbofah said “I mean, you cannot say they are not connected. They are connected. But I now also understand what they’re trying to do.”
That H&M Foundation recognizes that community can be a form of innovation alongside biofermented textile dyes or compostable RFID clothing tags is also heartening, he said. Agbofah forsees not just one hub in Ghana but everywhere in the global South where textile waste is a problem and creativity can be mustered.
“Africa has been put on the sidelines when it comes to climate innovation,” he said. “So the lab is to position Africa as leading in climate innovations and solutions, and then also challenge the outdated idea that solutions must come from the global North all the time. So basically, our goal is to turn Ghana from a dumping ground into a design ground, from a place of waste to one of beauty. We’re building an ecosystem of opportunity.”
Nevertheless, a fundamental strain exists between H&M’s corporate and altruistic identities. Unlike the C&A Foundation, now known as Laudes Foundation, H&M Foundation hasn’t opted to change its name and dilute its association with the company that birthed it. Stefan Persson, the foundation’s founder, inherited nearly 45 percent of H&M Group from his father, Erling Persson, and is Sweden’s richest man because of it. Karl-Johan Persson, Stefan Persson’s son, is both a board member of H&M Foundation and chairman of H&M Group.
Certainly, the cynical have questioned if one organization is cleaning up a mess beget by another in the name of democratizing fashion, including through the proliferation of fossil-fuel materials. Speaking to Bloomberg in 2019, when he was still CEO of H&M Group, Karl-Johan Persson pushed back on the idea of slowing down production, saying that “stopping” consumption “may lead to a small environmental impact, but it will have terrible social consequences.”
H&M, like all fast fashion retailers, when they’re placed under scrutiny, has also been linked to the exploitation of garment workers who bear the brunt of what is known as the “sourcing squeeze” in production hubs such as Bangladesh, where some suppliers are forced to sell their output at less than the cost of manufacturing. And labor campaigners still challenge what appears to them as a rollback in the company’s living wage strategy, though the company itself says it has made progress.
There’s no denying that H&M Foundation has done a great deal of good. Its investment in ideas that might seem too radical for the market aside, it’s donated millions of dollars in emergency relief when earthquakes or flooding strike vulnerable parts of the globe. It’s supported education for refugee children, clean water and sanitation, livelihoods for informal waste pickers and funded factory decarbonization initiatives. The organization also recently pledged 9 million euros ($10.4 million), spread over three years, to “scale a just transition” in Bangladesh’s apparel sector by partnering with local grassroots groups to deliver skills, gender-sensitive and entrepreneurship training to women workers, standing out at a time when everyone else is tightening their pursestrings.
Even so, H&M Foundation’s efforts to promote sustainability exist “in tension with the practices of the company’s fast fashion model,” said Thulsi Narayanasamy, director of international advocacy at the Worker Rights Consortium, a Washington, D.C. labor rights group, adding that “poverty” wages in H&M’s supply chain enable the overproduction of cheap clothing, which in turn drives the same labor and environmental harms the foundation wrestles with.
“The fundamental shifts needed in the structure of garment manufacturing to deliver living wages and decent work are the same shifts required to curb fashion’s climate impact and achieve a genuinely just transition,” she added.
Its affiliation with the broader H&M umbrella can also be a positive thing for innovators. Though H&M Group doesn’t get any “sneak peeks” of the winners, the retailer’s venture arm has been keen to connect with every prize recipient, Lindmark said. Cycora aside, some of the winning innovations, such as Vegea’s grape-derived leather alternative and Unspun’s on-demand manufacturing technology, have found their way into capsule or pilot collections by H&M, for the former, and Weekday, for the latter.
“And I think that maybe is also something that others then get inspired by,” she said. “I mean, they have the same challenges as every big brand, that it’s quite hard to collaborate with some of these innovators because they are so early stage, but we do see that the knowledge exchange is equally important. So even if it’s a conversation that doesn’t lead to something now, it hopefully could lead to something in the future.”
A ‘safe space’
Some of the applications began as Hail Mary moves. When Walden Lam, Beth Esponnette and Kevin Martin came up with the idea of making custom jeans using body scanning and 3D weaving technology, it was during a time when startups based on the sharing economy—think Airbnb and Uber—were starting to break out. There didn’t seem to be much investor appetite for something based on hardware automation—the same one that it’s now scaling the deployment to various manufacturing sites in North America and Europe.
“We actually applied twice,” Lam said from Hong Kong. “The first year, we didn’t get anything. The second year—this was 2017—we got the Early Bird Award. Practically speaking, we only had a desktop prototype. And we were just beginning to apply for grants in the U.S. When we saw the Global Change Award and that there were attention and resources being allocated to such a nascent sector, we immediately jumped.”
Having come out on the other side, engaged with several new “generations” of changemakers and served as a member of the judging panel twice, Lam can confirm how “fairly unique” the Global Change Award is.
“They seriously take on idea-stage concepts where maybe you don’t even have a company formed,” he said. “Whereas a lot of accelerators require you to have a full founding team, resources, banking and all the legal paperwork in place. There’s definitely a gap between lab-idea companies to when companies have serious momentum to be getting some pre-seed or angel funding. So I think the program catalyzes ideas that are maybe too bold for funding mechanisms that we have in place.”
Lam said that what H&M Foundation has created is a “safe space” for sustainable fashion founders through the accelerator.
“The way it’s structured, it’s a year long, and you get to check in with your class in person,” he said. “And so every couple of months, you see progress, and you’ve made progress. We’ve been sharing notes around how to fundraise, how to pitch to investors, how to structure optics. And when new challenges come up, you get to pick the brains of people who are going through similar things.”
The Global Change Award has to innovate itself, too, in order to keep up with a changing world, Björne said. One of the aspects of the program that increased “quite a lot” due to feedback was the opportunities for peer-to-peer networking, which participants found especially helpful. Another has been a slight pivot away from business brass tacks to individual development.
“In the beginning, there was quite a lot of focus on idea development of the solution, and now we have incorporated much more of personal growth and self-leadership topics,” she said. “We have seen that it’s quite challenging to be a changemaker; you have this big vision, but the world is very complex, so you need to have grit and individual resilience.”
Systems thinking, which involves looking at a problem not in isolation but as part of a larger, more complex ecosystem, has also permeated both the accelerator program and the broader remit of H&M Foundation itself. “Circularity,” while a still-buzzy concept, doesn’t carry all the answers for a world bedeviled by climate breakdown and an ever-yawning chasm between the haves and have-nots.
“Now we are seeing much more distributed types of solution,” Olsson said. “H&M Foundation is now extremely focused on supporting the industry with the decarbonization agenda, but doing so with a just transition lens, meaning in a way that respects people and planets in that transition. And, obviously, that strategy is also interlinked to what type of solutions and changemakers we have been working with in this program.”
Still, the truth remains that many early-stage innovations fail. For every Ambercycle or Unspun, there are scores of promising ideas that didn’t gain the same traction. It’s difficult to say why some succeed where others flounder. Olsson posits that it’s one part human vision, one part finding the right collaborators and one part grit. And sometimes? Pure luck.
“I think we shouldn’t remove luck from the equation,” said Sarika Bajaj, co-founder and CEO of Refiberd, a Bay Area startup that is using spectroscopy and AI to sort textile waste for recycling. Since receiving a Global Change Award and one-tenth of a share in the 2 million-euro ($2.3 million) grant, in 2023, Refiberd went on to win the eBay’s Circular Fashion Innovator of the Year in April and Global Fashion Summit’s Trailblazer Programme in June, scoring another $300,000 and $200,000, respectively, to put toward its post-lab scale-up.
“We forget that we need a lot of innovators to try a lot of things at a moment,” Bajaj said. “And there’s a lot of time and people in place that can kind of connect things together. I think the fact that the tech started working for us last year helped us a lot, because that meant that whenever we were doing testing and evaluation with potential partners, our results were going well. But even really good scientists and engineers could have that fail in that moment, right? Like, maybe it needs an extra year. So I feel like startups have to do a very careful dance of enough funding and enough customer interest to be able to sit and grow.”
Even the fact that Refiberd doesn’t need a lot of financing to keep itself afloat because of the nature of its technology is a nice bit of happenstance. Most new material players need hundreds of millions of dollars to establish facilities. In Bajaj’s case, as long as the company has the sensors, it can “develop the AI and wait for the market to be ready to adopt us.”
“Obviously, we’ve been seeing a lot of public companies fail recently, and I see a lot of articles being like, ‘Oh, you know, it was because of this reason or that reason,’” she said. But once you’re in the startup space, you realize there are a million reasons why you can fail. And, really, the harder question is, ‘Why does one succeed?’ That’s so tricky for the industry to grasp, especially the bigger players are like, ‘Oh well, we shouldn’t have done X, Y and Z.’ And I’m like, ‘Actually, who knows?’ It’s never obvious.”
Lindmark said that H&M Foundation isn’t disappointed when an innovation doesn’t make it to market. The real disappointment, she said, would be if it didn’t take any chances, particularly at a time of unprecedented market turmoil and economic restiveness that has both brands and investors feeling gun-shy about where they’re spending their dollars.
“I think when you back early ideas, you have to accept risk, because there’s also this major potential that you can achieve,” she said. “It’s a natural thing that some innovations don’t make it the full way, but I hope that those founders continue in other ways. Whether they continue with the same idea or another form, at least we tried our best to give them the equipment they need for that next journey.”
One of the problems with innovation is that they have to learn how to thrive in a “very short-term society” that has a hard time understanding that “some things take time.”
“I think that we have a lot of winners that need time,” Lindmark said. “They need space to work, and it will require resilience and patience. There are things that make me frustrated, of course, because I can see the potential in these innovators so much. But the biggest hurdle is that people must be willing to give them a chance.”
