Ganni's Ditte and Nicolaj Reffstrup on sustainability and building a brand | Vogue Codes Australia

Hello, my name is Alice Birrell and I am the Fashion Features Director here at Vogue Australia. Today I'm joined with Ditte and Nicolaj from the wonderful Ganni. Thank you so much, both of you, for joining us.

Of course, thank you for having us.

It's such a pleasure to have you all the way from Denmark dialing in. We've been so lucky to have a Sydney store of Ganni just open up, which we're really excited about. Ganni is for everyone and a lot of Ganni loyalists. I think for us that shows a lot of the similarities between Australian style and Danish style, which is always pointed out and I'm sure you've spoken about many times. It's not just here that your brand resonates in Australia — it's all over the world. Nicolaj, from your perspective, did you recognize that Ganni could be a global brand in the way that it is today from the very beginning? And Ditte, did you share that view from the start?

Well, I think it was not so much whether I knew that it could become a global brand — it was just kind of a precondition for me joining the project back then. Because I have a background in tech, and looking from that side into the fashion world, I realized that a lot of, in particular, Scandinavian brands didn't really make it outside of Scandinavia. But you have an opportunity of, say, five to ten years where you can kind of allow yourself to be the new kid on the block — the new hot brand. But if you don't manage to build a proper business behind it throughout that time frame, then you risk kind of diluting yourself as a business and as a brand. So it was a precondition for me joining project Ganni that we would insist on becoming an international brand.

No, but it's also one thing kind of having this idea and ambition or insisting that you want to be an international brand, and then it's a completely different thing exercising that thought and turning it into practice. There's a guiding vision, but it's all in the daily grind — it's the decisions you make on an everyday basis that ultimately ends up turning you into a global brand.

Exactly, and I think here you are ten years later — we're celebrating the Sydney store, you're dialing in and speaking to so many people here who love your work. But looking at the brand as a whole, something that's unique about the brand and about you two is that you're partners and you work together in business and you share a life together. Having that personal connection — does that add a layer of personal investment in the ethos and the passions behind the brand? And then on the other end of the spectrum, what are those challenges of working together so closely and living in that world together?

Well, I mean, it's been twelve years of couples therapy, right? Just talking to you. So there are definitely ups and downs, but I think most importantly it's kind of kept us relevant to each other all throughout the years. We've got to build a lot of big respect and admiration for each other in the process. And I think in many ways we've been good at kind of pulling the other one up from a dark hole if you've had rough times at work — and it happens all the time. We've been good at kind of balancing it out. The hard bit is if you both hit the bottom at the same time, right.

But we've had to put in place kind of rules for how we interact and how we are private about some things and how we go about talking about work. For many years we had this rule that nobody can mention anything from work after eight o'clock at night, because otherwise if you were bugged by something and you pass that bug on to your significant other, then you were kind of relieved but the other one might be kept awake at night thinking about how to solve problems. So we had a few rules in place that definitely helped us.

Sure, eight o'clock is still quite late at night though, so I'm sure you're both working very hard. So the big thing we wanted to talk about today as well is the sustainable aspect of Ganni. I know you don't always like to use the word sustainability — you've sort of pointedly used the word responsibility. I'd love for you to explain that deliberate choice of wording and why that was so important to you.

Well, I've been involved with the climate change agenda for twenty-five years, for various reasons. And ending up in the fashion industry was somewhat of a contradiction, right? So I've had to come to terms with that, and I've been sharing my concerns with Ditte throughout the years. It's been an ongoing conversation between us. Having said that, a little bit like with red meat — I didn't realize that red meat was a bad thing until, I don't know, five or ten years ago, from a climate perspective, and I reduced my consumption. Same thing with fashion. I was not aware that the fashion industry was worse off than any other industry when we embarked on Project Ganni. But when we became aware that from a climate perspective it's not really a good thing, we had these endless conversations internally about whether it made sense to put another fashion brand out there. We've been going back and forth over that over the years, but ultimately ended up agreeing that as long as we do better than most other alternatives out there, we can allow ourselves to continue to do fashion — we just need to do it responsibly. However, that also involves acknowledging that fashion is raw consumption. We don't need more garments out there. So talking about sustainability or circularity for that matter is very, very sensitive.

And I think that's definitely reflected in the things you're doing at the moment and in recent years. I'm going to pull up some numbers. You have an incredible amount of information available for your customer. I think 2019 was the first Ganni game plan, the first responsibility strategy. You had forty-four goals for 2023 — you reached, correct me if I'm wrong, forty of those goals. Then you evolved those remaining goals for a 2025 strategy, and now you have a 2027 strategy and ambition which includes carbon reduction by 50%, which is all very impressive. When we're talking about accountability and setting targets — and you do set accountability for yourselves — how do you balance that idea of setting these big targets and being ambitious and really challenging yourself in the business with being realistic about what you can actually achieve?

So practically speaking, from a day-to-day perspective, we go about it like probably any other strategy process. You dream up scenarios that you'd like to achieve, say five or ten years down the road, and then you reality-check what your dreams are — does it literally make sense? Specifically, we apply a concept called scenario-based thinking, where we kind of dream up how we'd like to see Ganni five years down the road — like with our 50% carbon reduction, for instance — and then we backtrack to today and break it down into tangible targets or KPIs and investigate whether that makes sense. And then you somewhat strike an internal compromise between dreams and practicalities and figure out what you think you can achieve while still pushing the limits for what the practicalities of today will tell you are your limits. So it's a compromise, but it's very consensus-driven. We're so driven by consensus — even internally in our company, it's all consensus-driven.

And I think part of this incredible strategy is your Fabrics for the Future initiative, which is really quite incredible. I'd encourage people to go and look up what's going on with that. Looking at the innovation that you're introducing into the business, it's all about finding different ways of working and harnessing that innovation for solutions — for raw materials and introducing them into the supply chain. Can you talk us through the Fabrics of the Future program? I guess a brief overview, because there is a lot of detail, and how you're replacing certain fabrics and which of those innovations you're most excited about at the moment.

Yeah, so I can provide a bit of context and then Ditte can tell more about how we work with that on a day-to-day basis. I guess it's all derived from the thought of trying to reduce your carbon footprint. When you go about mapping out your carbon footprint — which we did with respect for the first time in 2016, an exercise that took place in 2017 looking back at 2017 — you realize that the predominant part of your carbon footprint is derived from the actual product and the actual fabric going into that product. So in order to reduce your carbon footprint, you need to use responsible alternatives or alternative fabrics that are better than the conventional version. Ideally something that's recycled, because it's already out there — it's been produced by someone else. Or innovative new materials that have a significantly lower carbon footprint. Those are lab-grown sometimes, definitely developed and put out there by startups, new companies that are typically fueled by venture capital money. It's very early days of them trying to put a commercially viable product in the market, so there's a huge amount of unknown factors. And as a fashion brand, you rarely have R&D inside, so you rely on an ecosystem of external players that will bring those products forward to the market.

So that brings me to Fabrics of the Future. It's a virtual team internally in Ganni where we work with these innovative new startups on making sure there's a product-market fit between what they are doing and what we need. We help them test and scale up their product and act as a launch pad or marketing platform for them. Ultimately, what we want to do with those materials is bring them to the market in a way or shape or form where it's commercially viable for others to tap into that, so we can reach scale. Currently we're constantly looking at around thirty different innovative new materials that we test along a range of criteria — like look and feel, aesthetics, performance, durability, permeability, scale, cost, and stuff like that. And then ultimately we enter into off-take agreements to help them bring the product to market.

Your job is less hard, detailed — your job is to bring the desirability to these fabrics and these innovations. In some ways, do you feel that your job is easier?

And how has your customer responded to that? I mean, do you feel you have cult pieces like cowboy boots that everybody loves and they've been traditionally in leather — how do you go about re-educating the consumer, and what are they responding like at the moment to these changes?

So generally speaking, people appreciate the effort and buy into the idea. We've also had some somewhat weird hiccups with customers because leather is perceived as a luxury good, although it's actually a commodity — it's abundant out there, unless we're talking exotic leathers. It goes into literally a lot of products. People still have this perception that leather is more luxurious, even though you can't necessarily identify a difference between a lab-grown leather or a real leather. There's still a little bit of a reluctance — there's a resistance because you want the leather because it's more luxurious in your perception. So we've had some funny reactions like that that I hadn't expected, but I understand the mechanism. Overall, though, people are supporting the idea. Bear in mind, though, there's not a consumer out there that wants to pay a premium for a sustainably or responsibly sourced product, and I totally understand that. It's our moral obligation to bring that option to the end consumer. It has to be identical to a conventionally sourced product, because otherwise we're never going to get these responsibility efforts to scale.

Definitely. Look, I wanted to talk to you about something that not many businesses have, or that I'm aware of — your Carbon Squad. I think it's a great idea and quite amazing. Can you tell me what it is, what does it do in a nutshell, because I know we're running short on time? And I guess you plan for it to be obsolete — you don't want it to exist forever. Can you tell us a bit about that?

So the Carbon Squad is one of many virtual teams that operate across the entire organization. It's cross-departmental. It's a team that drives us towards our carbon target, which is a 50% reduction in absolute terms of our carbon footprint by 2027, compared to 2021 or 2020. We consider anything that pertains to responsibility as a change management project. You need to ensure that it's anchored throughout the organization, that everybody embraces it and adopts it and makes it part of their default mode of operation. What you'd like to avoid is the situation where the sustainability department or responsibility department dictates KPIs or ambitions that need to be achieved and it's not anchored with all the other departments. I usually compare that to being in tech in the late 1990s when the internet emerged — it would end up with the marketing department because we looked at it as some kind of sales tool. And then fast forward to today, where it's abundant — it's everywhere. We all use the internet and software tools and we think digitalization before anything else. You'd want the same thing to happen with the responsibility agenda. It has to be baked into everything you do, and the Carbon Squad is one example of that — trying to make that knowledge diffuse throughout the organization.

So we work with responsibility along two axes — there's awareness and impact. Some of the products that have the biggest impact can be quite boring. Mapping out your entire supply chain throughout to tier four is a full-time job for someone, but it's not really relevant for a lot of people. So it's high on impact but low on awareness or low on engagement. Whereas when we grow oyster mushrooms in the coffee grounds from our espresso machine in the container — and it's product display in the Canteen — everybody can see it and engage with it. We harvest them every Thursday and we literally eat them, and it's Instagram-friendly and all of that. But it has close to zero impact — it's more an educational effort that ensures people can relate to our responsibility projects. So we always have that dynamic going on.

Now I'm sure there's a lot of people listening to this thinking what an inspiring place to work, and there are a lot of businesses who are building things like you with this incredible component that's working towards responsible practice. I wondered what you both look for in someone who works at Ganni or might want to have a role in this space. What would you say to them? What kind of skills could they look for to really best position themselves to do something like this in the future?

I mean, from my perspective, unless you want to work specifically in the responsibility department, I'd much rather see people with a variation of backgrounds — from finance to production to sourcing to logistics to whatever. Like, specialize in whatever they do and then embrace the sustainability agenda. Because we need it baked into everything we do. And then there are obviously expert roles within responsibility where you need to have a certain area of expertise. But other than that, I'd rather see people with a sense of purpose and people that are willing to embrace the brand, no matter what background they have.

Well, hopefully there are more and more people like that out there today, and we encourage them all. But thank you so much, Ditte, and thank you, Nicolaj, for your time. It's been such a pleasure to speak to you.

Now it's back to Jess over at the Vogue Code Summit.