Practical advice on how to protect and future-proof your sustainability budget, for UK Fashion Brands, from UK Fashion Brands, with support from Segura.
This blog outlines how to strengthen your sustainability budget by aligning it with business value, leveraging supply chain transparency, and using data to make a compelling case.
Key Sections:
Understand the CFO Mindset
Map Initiatives to Business Value
Lead with Quick Wins
Show the Hidden Costs of Inaction
Quantify Reputation Risk
Tap Into Available Funding
Build Cross-Functional Alliances
Present Scenario Planning
Conclusion: Protecting your budget
In today’s economic environment, many fashion brands face increasing pressure to tighten budgets, streamline operations, and “do more with less.” Under these constraints, sustainability initiatives are often first on the chopping block, seen as non-essential or long-term luxuries.
But this approach is a serious mistake.
At the RSSC 2025 panel discussion featuring; Kaiesha Gibson, Head of CSR at Pentland Brands, Francesca Mangano, Head of CSR & Sustainability at TFG London, and design veteran Barbara Horspool, formerly of Marks & Spencer, New Look, and The White Company, offered a candid look at how brands can approach sustainability conversations internally.
Your sustainability budget is not just a moral obligation; it's a strategic investment in business resilience, risk mitigation, and competitive strength. In fact, supply chain transparency has emerged as a critical enabler for sustainable, future-fit fashion brands.
Here’s how to build a rock-solid case for your ESG efforts, and how Segura can help you back it up with data, speed, and clarity.
Why it matters:
CFOs are under pressure to prioritise spending that delivers measurable impact, and fast. Ongoing sustainability projects need to be positioned as a value driver, putting forward the case of risk mitigation can help. Which regulations is your business required to comply with? What are the implications of non-compliance - reputational risk effecting sales or potential fines? Both of which your CFO will want to avoid, and therefore you create value.
You can also show the hidden costs of inaction and present scenarios to help your CFO visualise impacts
How Segura helps:
Segura equips you with real-time supply chain data that translates sustainability into CFO friendly terms:
Why it matters:
Prioritising the right sustainability projects ensures your budget works harder; demonstrating the delivery of 'quick win' results but also showing how the initiative can deliver more value to the business over time. Focus on those with short payback periods and demonstrate long-term value creation.
Where supply chain transparency plays a key role:
Understanding where your materials come from, how they’re produced, and who’s producing them allows you to:
Segura gives you the visibility to prioritise what really matters.
Why it matters:
Short-term goal delivery can help to build trust in an initiative. A Leadership team usually wants to see fast results. Projects that deliver results early on but also have the capability of deliverying more over time, with no additional cost, can help you to protect your budget and open doors for expansion.
Quick wins through Segura include:
Why it matters:
Choosing to delay or underfund sustainability efforts carries serious, and often invisible, financial consequences;
Segura helps you surface and address these hidden risks before they escalate.
Why it matters:
Your stakeholders; investors, customers, employees - may not talk about sustainability every day, but they’re still watching. Brands that backslide risk losing trust as outlined above (and in the hidden costs of inaction).
With Segura, you gain:
Reputation is built on action, and action must be visible and traceable.
Why it matters:
Even in a constrained economy, capital is flowing into sustainability, especially when you can demonstrate impact, traceability, and alignment with regulatory frameworks.
With Segura’s data-driven platform, you can:
Why it matters:
Although CSR teams take the lead, Sustainability isn't just the responsibility of one team, it affects the entire organisation, and defending the budget becomes much easier when multiple departments see and feel the value.
By building internal alliances, you shift sustainability from being a “cost centre” to a strategic enabler embedded across multiple functions.
But this collaboration can’t happen without visibility, and that starts with the supply chain.
Buying & Merchandising
Buying teams sit at the frontline of supply chain decision-making and gain significant value from visibility and traceability. When aligned with the CSR function and equipped with verified sustainability data, they can make informed sourcing decisions based on supplier compliance and ESG performance, avoid reputational and operational risks, confidently support more sustainable ranges, reduce admin around audits and certifications, and strengthen relationships with suppliers who share the brand’s sustainability values.
Finance
Gain access to reliable data on supplier risk, and cost-saving opportunities, helping sustainability move from “intangible” to “investment-worthy.”
Operations
Can identify inefficiencies, eliminate risky suppliers, and streamline logistics when they know exactly who’s in the supply chain and how they perform.
Marketing & Brand
Get verified claims and storytelling assets (e.g; ethical sourcing, supplier engagement, climate action) that build consumer trust and retailer confidence.
HR & People Teams
Leverage sustainability as a purpose-driven message in talent acquisition and retention, helping to attract younger, value-driven employees.
Segura acts as a unifying platform, not only capturing the supply chain data, but by also capturing other departmental data. Offering one source of truth across your teams.
Why it matters:
When budgets are tight, decisions need to be forward-looking. Paint a picture of what the future looks like with and without sustainability investment. Show how this could impact internal alliances, highlight the hidden costs. Reference any early results delivered and demonstrate how more can be delivered overtime.
With Segura, you can clearly demonstrate:
Like your future depends on it - because it does.
One standout piece of advice from Barbara Horspool during the panel debate at RSSC 2025 on securing board-level approval for a sustainability strategy was to distil the message into a single, focused paragraph, clearly outlining the risks of inaction and the opportunities being missed by standing still.
Both Pentland Brands and TFG London echoed this approach, noting that using Segura’s software over has helped them build stronger business cases and gain greater visibility into their supply chains. The hour-long discussion with Kaiesha Gibson, Francesca Mangano, and Barbara Horspool offered valuable insights into how brands are engaging leadership on sustainability — and a consistent theme emerged: data is the key to making the argument land.
One thing is clear, fashion is changing rapidly. The brands that will lead the next era are the ones that commit to traceable, transparent, and ethical supply chains, not just for optics, but because it’s how future-ready businesses operate.
Removing your sustainability budget is not a neutral act. It’s a step toward:
If you’d like to have a free exploratory call, get in touch with us today: info@segura.co.uk
To support you in your efforts to protect budgets we have collated some external resources that you may find useful: