Reformation is closing out its five-year climate roadmap with a result that looks less like a clean win and more like a reality check for fashion’s decarbonization playbook.
“We did not get everything right, but we also think that that’s what it takes to move forward again, not just as a company, but as an industry,” said Kathleen Talbot, Reformation’s chief sustainability officer and vice president of operations. “We really do think that speed drives progress.”
The Los Angeles-based brand said it has met its science-based Scope 3 targets and reduced product carbon intensity by 29 percent between 2021 and 2025, while sourcing 97.5 percent of its fibers from recycled, regenerative or renewable inputs. The brand also invested in carbon removal projects that account for approximately 125 percent of its total footprint.
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But the bigger takeaway from its “climate positive” push may be what didn’t go according to plan. When Ref set its 2025 Climate Positive goal in 2020, there was no clear playbook for fashion brands to implement ambition at such scale or speed.
“We were motivated by really the urgency of climate change… emissions were actually on the rise… and most public and corporate commitments had failed or were projected to fail,” Talbot said, noting that while industry “near-term” targets are often set for 2030 or 2050, a five-year milestone was necessary to drive immediate accountability and align with the business’s natural planning cycles.
Much of that effort was concentrated upstream.
“Scope three… represents about 98 percent of our emissions and is really the vast majority of our impact,” Talbot said. That footprint meant the brand had to prioritize interventions at the raw-material and manufacturing stages.
“Materials matter more than anything else,” Talbot said. For Reformation, raw material sourcing drives 40 percent of the brand’s total carbon footprint.
The company’s biggest gains came from shifting its material mix and scaling lower-impact fibers, alongside investments in circularity and supply chain programs.
But not all of its targets proved realistic. While Reformation met its Scope 3 goals, it missed its Scope 1 and 2 reduction targets—something that the company attributed, in part, to business growth and structural constraints.
“We didn’t have a realistic path… and we began publicly owning that miss,” Talbot said.
The brand struggled with Scope 1 and 2 because it already sourced 100 percent renewable electricity in its baseline year; opening 10 to 15 new stores annually made absolute reductions difficult.
More broadly, the roadmap exposed the limits of tackling emissions in isolation. Efforts to reduce impact in one area often created pressure elsewhere—particularly in logistics.
While carbon-intensive, air freight enables a “small batch” model that prioritizes waste mitigation by replenishing only what sells. By avoiding the systemic waste of overproduction, Ref’s rate of unsold or donated products is below 1 percent.
In a separate challenge, the Factory Forward program exposed a disconnect between data collection and suppliers’ actual capacity to implement reduction projects.
Talbot noted that moving from assessment to real action is “slower, more complex and more capital intensive than it looks on paper,” requiring a “deep partnership approach with strategic suppliers” and the “right level of investment” to put “dollars behind the commitments.”
Those constraints point to a larger challenge facing the industry.
“The low-hanging fruit is behind us; this work is actually only going to get more challenging,” Talbot said. “Building on this foundation, circularity has really become our Anchor Goal now from 2026 to 2030.”
