Empowering regenerative agriculture and circularity at J.Crew

Katie O’Hare has been working in the fashion and apparel sustainability space since she graduated from the Erb Institute in 2011. She started at ANN INC., the parent company of Ann Taylor and LOFT, as its first full-time sustainability hire, and later moved to PVH, the parent company of Calvin Klein and Tommy Hilfiger. Six years ago, she joined J.Crew as one of two sustainability hires. “I was brought in to build the strategy, basically, and figure out what we wanted to stand for as a company and how we wanted to implement it,” she says. 

“I love the brand and have been a fan of J.Crew since I got the catalog, which I think is true of many people, and so I thought that this was a great opportunity to build the program from the ground up for a brand that I really loved and connected with,” O’Hare says. She has moved up from senior manager to director, senior director and now VP of sustainability. Now she’s responsible for all things sustainability across all the brands, including Madewell and J.Crew Factory. 

O’Hare sees her role as similar to an internal consultant. “We have a relatively small team, so we really work to help the company set the priorities, figure out the plan and then embed what we’re doing into the business,” she says. 

One example is sustainable raw materials. O’Hare works closely with the raw materials team “to help them understand what the different sustainable material options are, help them find partners that can potentially source those materials, help them think through some of the trade-offs with cost and then help them track it,” she says. “Over time, they take these initiatives and run with them, and I become more of a support role for them.”

O’Hare’s time at Erb prepared her for this work by giving her the skills to build the business case for various internal partners. “When you’re at Erb, you always talk about how you felt like you were the hippie at the business school and the corporate person at SNRE [now SEAS]. You learn so much from navigating those two worlds,” she says. “Being able to talk to people where they are, and represent the other side in a way that folks can understand, has really been instrumental in helping me drive change within the organization.”

Regenerative agriculture

One of the programs O’Hare is especially proud of is that J.Crew is supporting 35 cotton farmers across the U.S. by paying them directly to fund their transition to regenerative agriculture. “Then we’re trying to use that cotton in our products, and we have about 60 products this year that are using regenerative cotton,” she says.  

Cotton makes up about 70% of the company’s materials footprint. “But we’re also using cashmere and wool and leather and all these things that come from land-based sources—from farms. So when we look at the future, we recognize that soil health is really important, not just from a sustainability perspective, but from a business perspective, too,” she says. Although regenerative agriculture is not a new concept, the apparel industry has been slower to embrace it, she says. 

Funding the farmers helps build supply. “Cotton farming is really hard, and cotton farmers face a lot of risk,” O’Hare says. If changing their farming practices decreases their yield, for example, “it can really make or break whether or not they make any profit that year. . . . Even the most well-intentioned cotton farmer—or any farmer, to be honest—may want to make these changes, but they may just not be able to because of the risks involved.”

The funding gives farmers “a little bit of a cushion to make those changes, and then also shows that, as brands, we’re serious about this, and we’re ready to pay to help make these changes.” 

Equity is an important part of this program, considering the history of cotton farming in the U.S., O’Hare says. Two years ago, J.Crew set out to diversify the farmer pool that it was working with and partnered with the Federation of Southern Cooperatives (FSC), a cooperative of Black farmers, landowners and co-ops, including some cotton farmers. “There are currently four FSC farmers in J.Crew’s program, but we are really invested in this relationship and in the mission of the FSC and making sure that we’re driving sustainable changes equitably across the U.S.,” she says. 

Circularity for apparel

Another approach that more apparel brands are embracing is circularity, O’Hare says. J.Crew has been considering how it can think differently about its current business model, such as creating resale sites where customers can trade in their products and shop “pre-loved” products. It’s not a traditional business model, “but it’s something that we’re leaning into, and we’re starting to see that as a revenue stream and starting to figure out how we can leverage that more strategically,” she says.

J.Crew launched a swim take-back and recycling program this year. “Swim is traditionally really, really hard to recycle because it’s a synthetic and it’s blended with elastic, which is an apparel recycler’s nightmare,” O’Hare says. But J.Crew partnered with Supercircle, which has the technology to take apart the swimsuits and sort the materials into different streams for recycling. 

Supercircle also can drive fiber-to-fiber recycling, O’Hare says. “A lot of recycling that you have right now is what we call down-cycling, so it is shredding something to go to housing insulation or car stuffing. But we were really invested in driving what we think is the future of circularity, which is truly turning a garment into a new garment.” Some of Supercircle’s partners can take back synthetics, such as “sending the nylon to a partner who can turn that into recycled nylon to be used in future products. The goal is one day that we can buy that fiber back and turn it into new swimsuits.”

The swim take-back program has been a huge success, with more than 15,000 swimsuits collected. “The average amount of swimsuits that people have sent back each time is six,” which O’Hare says signals that people want to be able to do something responsible with their swimwear when they’re done with it. 

O’Hare’s Behavior, Education and Communication specialization at SNRE gave her skills that she has brought into all her roles, she says. It gave her a “foundation on what motivates people, and how to talk to people, and how to drive behavior change and organizational change.”