D?EN Receives 2024 MAFI Award at SJ’s Sustainability LA Event
Moss Adams, an integrated professional service, accounting and consulting firm, presented its annual Moss Adams Fashion Innovator Award 2024 to fashion brand D?EN at Sourcing Journal’s inaugural Sustainability LA event on September 26.
For this year’s winner, Moss Adams focused not only on a brand that achieved innovation through growth over the past year, but one that also demonstrated both sustainability and diversity by being a woman-owned company with an all woman-led executive team.
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“The reason why I’m presenting the award today at a Sustainability Summit [is because] the award was created by the firm many, many years ago to give back to an industry that has been one of the pillar industries within our firm’s rich history,” said Marco Valverde, apparel national practice leader, Moss Adams. “And also to recognize the immense talent that we have here in LA, California and nationwide.”
Peter Sadera, editor in chief of Sourcing Journal, praised D?EN not just for its business acumen and commitment to female leadership, but also for how the LA-based company treats its workers along the supply chain and the due diligence steps it takes to make sure it’s acting responsibly.
“There’s a saying in their ethos that day to day, small changes lead to huge change. And that really stuck out to me,” said Sadera. “And when we’re talking about how you change things, we all want to get somewhere, but we can’t get there tomorrow, so it’s these incremental changes that will make a difference.”
A holistic approach
Kristine Kim, senior director, impact & responsible sourcing at D?EN, accepted the award, praising her company for not thinking of its supply chain in terms of “transactional value created with a bulk purchase order,” but rather how it focuses on capturing the environmental and social value across every function and tier of that model.
“At D?EN, we’ve always had a more holistic approach since the inception of the brand. [Founding sisters] Margaret and Katherine Kleveland, like all of us, were very disenchanted with the state of the take, make, waste, model of the fashion system, and the dearth of female leadership in the industry,” said Kim. “So when they created the brand, they had this value proposition in place that they built it around. And by the time that I joined the team, about three years ago, there was already a lot of practices in place around women’s empowerment, working with female owned factories, a point of view on preferred materials and an awareness around environmental impact of those material choices.”
D?EN has notably partnered with RISE (Reimagining Industry to Support Equity) at the garment factory level, and as “one of the smallest if not the smallest brands” in the program, D?EN hopes to make a difference for the multigenerational worker families that are often excluded from such programs. “Traditionally, these types of value-add capacity building programs at the factory level have been reserved for much larger, big box retailers that have behemoth manufacturing facilities with thousands and thousands of garment workers, and who have the bandwidth and the resources to really host capacity building,” said Kim.
D?EN also spent a year and a half putting together its “preferred material strategy,” which will be published in its 2024 Impact Report. Here, D?EN had extensive conversations with all of its value chain partners in terms of what materials they had access to, not to mention fibers, certifications and processes.
“We spoke pre-competitively, collaboratively with other brands, and really relied on their feedback, their guidance, their learnings, their challenges,” said Kim, adding that the company’s 2030 goal is to source all of its primary materials from regenerative, recycled or responsibly sourced, renewable sources, and for our animal fibers to use fibers exclusively from certified, traceable supply chains that align to our animal welfare policy, which will also be published later this year in our impact report.”
D?EN is a member of the Global Reporting Institute’s Working Group on the textile and apparel sector standards for sustainability reporting, and acknowledges the push others might need to come around. “Like every industry before fashion, we need laws to really give us guardrails and guidelines on how to have best practices in our industry, to protect human rights and to protect environmental issues. Because, quite frankly, we don’t have a shot in hell to change the system unless we have laws guiding us to do so.”
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