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Ken Pucker

Teacher, Writer, Investor, Adjunct Professor, Advisory Director, Berkshire Partners

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  • Home
  • Articles
    • Business of Fashion
    • Harvard Business Review
    • Institutional Investor
    • Stanford Social Innovation Review
  • Media
  • Case Studies
  • Podcasts
  • TEDX
  • Fashion’s carbon footprint is outpacing its climate progress

    As brands and sustainability leaders descend on New York for Climate Week, we take stock of where commitments lie and what needs to happen for progress to pull ahead.

    https://www.voguebusiness.com/story/sustainability/fashions-carbon-footprint-is-outpacing-its-climate-progress?uID=c079429c4c8bcfad965db9e40456b31002c73fcb7dd8cecdc470e0fcfbdde17d&utm_campaign=VB_NEWS_MEMBER_SustainabilityEdit_4_190924&utm_source=newsletter&utm_brand=vb&utm_mailing=VB_NEWS_MEMBER_SustainabilityEdit_4_190924&utm_medium=email&utm_term=VB_PaidSustainability

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  • THE MYSTERIOUS, METEORIC RISE OF SHEIN

    The most remarkable thing about Shein might be how opaque it remains even as it dominates U.S. retail. Its origins in China—where most Shein items are made—should, in theory, subject the company to extra scrutiny in the United States. Yet much about Shein is still unknown. How did it so quickly take over American retail? Who runs it, and how does it offer so many products so cheaply? Over the past year, I sought answers to these questions, and what I learned was hardly reassuring.

    https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2024/09/shein-ceo-chris-xu-fast-fashion/679709/?utm_campaign=atlantic-daily-newsletter&utm_content=20240906&utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_term=The+Atlantic+Daily

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  • Vanguard Splits From BlackRock Over Major Climate Alliance as the Backlash to ESG Builds

    Vanguard Splits From BlackRock Over Major Climate Alliance as the Backlash to ESG Builds

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  • The Steps Fashion Must Take to Hit Its Sustainability Goals

    “A miracle has to happen to save the survival of fashion as we know it,” trend forecaster Lidewij Edelkoort wrote to me in an email this week.

    I’d asked for thoughts on what a more responsible fashion industry might look like. The responses I received reflect a kind of grim, but stubborn determination to pursue change at the end of a year in which the industry as whole has (yet again) made no meaningful progress towards stated ambitions to curb environmental impact and improve working conditions.

     

    https://www.businessoffashion.com/articles/sustainability/fashion-sustainability-degrowth-regulation-business-model/

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  • As Brands Lurch Towards Green Goals, a Booming Business of Climate Change Is Emerging

    ‘Sustainability has become big business,’ said Ken Pucker, senior lecturer on sustainable business dynamics at The Fletcher School at Tufts University.

    As Brands Lurch Towards Green Goals, a Booming Business of Climate Change Is Emerging
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  • Nike Pledged to Shrink Its Carbon Footprint. It Just Slashed the Staff Charged With Making That Happen

    Nike Pledged to Shrink Its Carbon Footprint. It Just Slashed the Staff Charged With Making That HappenSince December, Nike has lost about 30% of employees who worked primarily on sustainability initiatives, due to layoffs, voluntary departures or transfers to other duties. Already, the company was missing its targets for reducing emissions.

    https://www.propublica.org/article/nike-layoffs-sustainability-climate-change

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  • Climate Change is Heating Up the Global Business World

    We sat down with Kenneth Pucker, sustainability, fashion, and ESG (Environment, Sustainability, and Governance) expert and professor of the practice in the online Master of Global Business Administration (GBA) at The Fletcher School at Tufts University. We discussed how sustainability, ESG, and businesses’ bottom lines collide with the expanding global warming crisis.

    Pucker is an accomplished writer, with articles appearing in the Stanford Social Innovation Review, Institutional Investor and the Harvard Business Review. Prior to his professorship at Tufts, he worked at Timberland, serving as chief operating officer from 2000 to 2007.

    https://globalbusiness.tufts.edu/experience/resources/global-business-and-climate-change/
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  • Ultra-fast Fashion Rot Spreads to Amazon

    Shein and competitors like Temu have grown so big that Amazon may be the only retailer that can compete with them.

    And that’s exactly what it plans to do with a new discount marketplace that would allow the same suppliers who make goods for the ultra-fast fashion titans to sell their stuff through Amazon. Unbranded items would cost less than $20 each and ship directly to consumers from China in nine to eleven days, the thinking being that U.S. shoppers would wait longer than Amazon’s usual shipment speed for a lower price. The marketplace will focus on fashion, home, and other lifestyle items, and launch in the fall.

     

    https://amyodell.substack.com/p/ultra-fast-fashion-rot-spreads-to

     

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  • The fizz firm fudging its footprint

    How can Keurig Dr Pepper report a 12% reduction in scope 3 emissions when they’ve actually increased by 14%? David Burrows reports.

    If more companies commit to measuring and reporting publicly on their sustainability performance, four things should happen. ESG performance should improve; more ‘sustainable’ companies should be rewarded; a link tying companies with better ESG records to better equity returns should emerge; and the measurements and reporting should become more rigorous. “Over time, this virtuous cycle would result in a more sustainable form of capitalism,” wrote professor Kenneth Pucker from Tufts University, Massachusetts, in an HBR paper in June 2021.

    The fizz firm fudging its footprint

     

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  • WE NEED TO TALK ABOUT SHEIN

    Up until this point, there’s something we’ve avoided talking about almost entirely. Giving this thing extra air time, extra oxygen, felt counterintuitive to everything we stand for. Even if we were being critical – which we would be – we wouldn’t be telling people anything they didn’t already know; preaching to the converted just for clicks. And that’s not what we’re about.

    That thing is SHEIN. And, try as we might, we can no longer avoid it; the fast fashion giant has inserted itself into the conversation, not by virtue of its planet-destroying practices, the ones we all know about, but by making claims at sustainability and circularity. By declaring itself a force for good. And let’s be clear: it is most certainly not that.

    https://futurevvorld.com/fashion/shein-sustainability/

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Focused on the challenges and opportunities at the intersection of capitalism and natural capital. 

Experienced leader committed to results delivery in values based environments.

Specialties: Writing, teaching, leadership, mentorship, strategy, sustainability, turnarounds, consumer products, operations management

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