Innovation Takes Center Stage at ISPO 2024: How Sustainability Became the New Standard
It was all happening in Hall 2 of ISPO this year. Some of the biggest brands in outdoor showcasing product for the coming seasons. Undoubtedly the biggest trend was Innovation and some commentators claimed that it trumped Sustainability. Through our lens it was very clear that the latter is now the norm, expected by consumers and embedded in company purpose – after all if we don’t all look after our planet these businesses will not have a market!
The Materials Lab was one of the best experiences at the show, connected to the Patagonia stand, it showcased innovation in sustainable materials. We are all familiar with recycled materials being used in fashion, there was also plenty to see in how we can repurpose waste for a second life, the interesting stuff was a 100% bio based elastomer made entirely from birch bark, a waste material from the forest industry and shells and olive pits turned into Thermoplastic elastomers.
There are plenty of use cases for these new materials and the focus was on their integration in the production processes of outdoor equipment and footwear. We also saw examples in the automotive manufacturing, but few for our own or the smaller industries that don’t always have the commercial scale of the legacy sectors that are the backbone of the global economy.
Our teams are excited about how we might start using these materials in Retail Design and Build. Our future will be sustainable and the material choices and industrial processes we define in the design process will deliver the biggest impact in our success.
It is good to see our customers setting sustainability goals for their retail operations and qualifying the environmental standards of their partners. The EcoVadis platform enables this quickly and easily, though few companies in our space have the global accreditation that we have pursued. Transformational change in our world will happen when the big brands don’t just look to the price of a fixture, instead they start looking at the total cost of making and landing that fixture in-store, it’s in life operation and what happens at end of life, both in dollars and impact on our planet.
Published December 2024