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 —ensuring that sustainability in the fashion industry remains a strategic priority, even in challenging times.
- Align Your Sustainability Budget with the Mindset of the CFO
- Link Sustainability Initiatives to Business Value
- Lead with Quick Wins
- Show the Hidden Costs of Inaction
- Quantify Reputation Risk with ESG data
- Access Sustainability Funding & ESG Grants in the UK
- Build Cross-Departmental Support for ESG Investment
- Use Scenario Planning to Build a Sustainable Fashion Supply Chain
- Conclusion: Protect your sustainability budget with one paragraph!
FAQs and Resources to help protect your sustainability 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 in the fashion industry has emerged as a critical enabler for sustainable, future-fit 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 affecting sales or potential fines? Both of which your CFO will want to avoid, and therefore you can demonstrate that sustainability investment creates 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 in the fashion industry 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 delivering more over time, with no additional cost, can help you to protect your budget and open doors for expansion.
Quick wins through Segura include:
These wins not only demonstrate value by reducing risk and non-compliance, they also generate momentum and increase consumer confidence.
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. Fashion 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, fashion 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 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.
Gain access to reliable data on supplier risk, and cost-saving opportunities, helping sustainability move from “intangible” to “investment-worthy.”
Can identify inefficiencies, eliminate risky suppliers, and streamline logistics when they know exactly who’s in the supply chain and how they perform.
Get verified claims and storytelling assets (e.g; ethical sourcing, supplier engagement, climate action) that build consumer trust and retailer confidence.
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:
Use data to drive strategic choices, not short-term assumptions.
Protect your sustainability budget like your future depends on it — because it does.
During the panel debate at RSSC 2025 Barbara Horspool gave an outstanding piece of advice. To secure board-level approval for a sustainability strategy ensure you distil your message into a single, focused paragraph, clearly outlining the risks of inaction and the opportunities being missed by standing still.
One paragraph may be your only chance to win your CFO's support. So, make it easy for your CFO. Board level execs need a clearly presented case to approve a budget, and it helps if they can read and understand all they need to know in less than 5 minutes and have confidence in that positive decision.
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:
Yes, EY reports that ESG performance has a growing significance to investors. Research shows that companies with robust ESG credentials capture more investors, as sustainability acts as a risk mitigator in the eyes of investors. Read more about ESG transparency is no longer seen as optional.
Studies have found that ESG has a direct impact on financing cost and the value of the company. Using multiple and DCF valuation methods, it was found that a 10-point increase in the ESG rating had a positive impact of 5 percent on the enterprise value of a company. Read more on the impact of ESG on company valuation.
An ESG rating measures a company’s exposure to long-term ESG risks. “Even if a board is focussed on short term share price, this is based on long-term expectations.” [Alex Admans, Professor of Finance, London Business School].
Key ESG rating criteria includes energy consumption in production and transportation; water usage in the manufacturing process; the amount of waste and its disposal; human rights due-diligence across its supply chain; track record of ethical behaviour and compliance with laws and regulations. These ESG rating KPIs are heavily dependent upon that of their upstream suppliers.
ESG laws and regulations require supplier transparency and product traceability data and evidence from across its entire upstream supply chain down to raw materials. See evidence of this.
A lack of insight into the value chain can introduce significant legal, reputational, market and liquidity risks for companies. Read more from Deloitte on how to leverage sustainability for business growth and resilience.