It’s been a few months since I’ve shared my reflections about a Supplier Meet-Up. It’s not that we’ve been sitting idle. On the contrary, over the last few months, we’ve met extra rigorously to plot the group’s next moves (no small feat for a group of supplier-side sustainability professionals that operate with super lean-to-non-existent support teams). 

Let me briefly rewind: normally, Supplier Meet-ups are private, off-the-record conversations open only to suppliers, held once per month. Each month, one supplier shares a specific challenge while the rest shares feedback and offers support. These Meet-Ups launched in late 2021.

Over the last two years, these Meet-Ups led to real friendships and camaraderie between real people. It’s been a rare space of refuge, inspiration, and dare-I-say-it: joy. What started as a space that served as a cheap way of getting group therapy (shh - don’t tell the GIZ FABRIC team who so generously supported our experiment!) became a space of co-creation. 

For example, towards the end of 2022, this recognition led to our first formal collaboration: An Apparel Supplier’s Guide to Sustainability Legislation in the US, UK, and EU, launched in July 2023. Some of the participating suppliers and supporters were regular Supplier Meet-Up participants, others were friends and supporters pulled in from our broader networks.  We’re now recruiting for a follow-up project to cover additional legislation, update last year’s fact sheets, and launch an educational webinar series for suppliers. (Side note: if you want to support this work, we’d love that - more here). 

Next came the Innovative Financing Models for Decarbonization. This white paper is due out later in Q1 and is being led by seven suppliers. Again, some of them are regular Supplier Meet-Up participants, others are friends and supporters pulled in from our broader networks. There are a few more projects in the works that we hope to share more about in the coming months.

And yet, despite Supplier Meet-Ups serving as an informal breeding ground for these initiatives, none of the initiatives publicly tied back to our Supplier Meet-Up group. Meanwhile, our monthly Supplier Meet-Ups continued as normal while also being landed with more and more requests from non-suppliers looking to collaborate, solicit feedback on initiatives, and beyond. We felt that this setup was confusing to outsiders and that we were missing an opportunity to better leverage our collective influence.  Thus, we spent the last few months of 2023 trying to articulate what this group has become and should be going forward. 

Our projects cover a range of topics and formats. For example, they could be research papers, ongoing peer knowledge-sharing groups (like our Monthly Supplier Meet-Ups), advisory committees, policy engagement & beyond. All of our projects are opt-in: producers are not publicly affiliated with the Collective unless they want to be. Producers in the collective can also choose which projects they want to participate in, support, or endorse - even if they have not been actively involved in that project. 

Like everything we’ve done thus far, the Collective is experimental: we don’t have it all figured out, we’ve simply plotted a dot on the horizon against which we regularly check our direction. But we have given some thought as to what we’ll test out in 2024, and if you’re curious to learn more about our experimentation plans, see here.  

So where does this leave Monthly Supplier Meet-Ups? They resume in their normal schedule and format as of Thursday 11 January 2024 and are open to any supplier with a commitment to coming regularly. January’s discussion will focus on traceability: suppliers will exchange about their challenges related to meeting increasingly stringent traceability requirements, compare notes on the platforms and service providers they’re using, and beyond.