What it takes to build an ethical supply chain at scale

Over the last few years, the environmental impact of clothing waste and the conditions around fabric manufacturing have become controversial focus points in the fashion world. For founders looking to create more sustainable solutions, building an ethical supply chain is often framed as a matter of values. But in practice, it’s a series of trade-offs—between sourcing, costs, and scale.

Vanessa Barboni Hallik, founder and co-CEO of sustainable fashion brand Another Tomorrow, knows that complexity firsthand. From tracing fibers and paying living wages to managing small, trusted manufacturing partners, every decision is guided by a strict framework.

Hallik breaks down what it actually takes to build a brand at the intersection of luxury and ethics—from operational realities to the everyday judgments that define her business.

This is an excerpt of our interview, which has been edited for length and clarity.

What do you think people underestimate about building an ethical supply chain?

You have to get really clear on what you stand for and your framework for making decisions right at the get-go, so that you’re not rethinking the values behind every single decision you make: You understand in a very rigorous, defensible way how you do things and then that simplifies building the business significantly…Having that very clear, tight framework, for me, was absolutely critical, and it’s where I’ve seen other businesses have more challenges at times.

What does it mean, in practice, to build a brand that is both luxury and sustainable?

We have three core pillars: environmental, human, and animal welfare. Those are both science and values-based, and it’s a very rigorous system through which we make our sourcing decisions. We are also a certified B Corp which addresses stakeholder governance, internally and externally, and this is how every decision at the company is made.

From the sourcing standpoint, our North Star is really taking “farm-to-table” to “farm-to-closet.” That means, wherever possible, direct farm-level relationships and traceability to ensure that we have a clear understanding of what’s happening on the ground…We pay living wages for all of our manufacturing. We have a really small, trusted group of manufacturers that are very close partners with us. It means we make a lot of our own custom fabrics with mills.

Where do some of these ethical choices—like paying living wages—show up most in the cost structure of the business?

When you’re making material choices, there can be a significant cost premium…Are conventional materials at a discount, or are sustainable materials at a premium? It’s a different way of thinking about it. Nonetheless, it is true that your cost structure is higher if you’re serious about adhering to sustainable materials and ethical manufacturing. For us, that’s what we build our cost base off of, and our margin structure off of, from the get-go, and it’s non-negotiable.

So that cost shows up in the prices of the products?

It does, but we also have a margin structure that is a sound margin structure. If you look at the margin structure in luxury, the ultimate retail price bears very little relationship to the actual cost base of the product. In our case, we have appropriate margins for what our business requires to be successful, but that doesn’t mean that we have the same margin structure that some luxury brands have in terms of the extent of the markup. We believe that we’ve been able to really deliver on exquisite quality and highest caliber sourcing at a price point that still really makes sense for the customer. I think that’s been the equation for us that we’ve been very, very careful about and making sure that that nexus really, really makes sense and drives value.

From where you sit at Another Tomorrow, where do you see the biggest disconnect between what consumers expect from ethical brands and the production that’s actually required?

We sit squarely within the luxury ecosystem. I really think about clothing as an asset. Where consumers are aligning with that is in the massive growth that we’ve seen in secondhand, in resale. So it’s quite fascinating that the same customer, who sometimes is actually purchasing lower-priced products, is also purchasing secondhand.

The key equation for the customer is around purchasing quality, purchasing products that last, and really thinking about the price per wear and/or the residual value from those purchases…When people are purchasing things now, they’re actually thinking about: Is this something that’s actually going to retain value after I purchase it, or is it going to fall apart and effectively lose all of its value?

There also is a lot more education around what matters when purchasing ethically in fashion. The baseline level of awareness is extremely low, and if you don’t know what you don’t know, it’s very difficult to employ that at point of purchase.

What tends to break first when you try to scale an ethical supply chain?

You have to understand what the bottlenecks are going to be and you have got to build around them to begin with. That was really critical to our success—making sure our sourcing philosophy actually was scalable. For example, we went from sourcing from one or two farms for our wool to seven farms. We built in scale through building out a portfolio of ethical and regenerative farm-based relationships to make sure that we had the right range of technical properties and the right degree of risk mitigation.

It also means that you need to have partnerships that can scale with you. Your manufacturers, your mills, you have got to make sure they have the right level of capacity to scale alongside your business, or you can bring additional capacity online. You always have to be thinking several years ahead to make sure the sourcing protocol is fundamentally scalable.

Can you point to a moment where adhering to your core pillars had a real impact on the business? Were there times when the numbers didn’t quite work?

There are things that we say no to constantly because they do not adhere to our framework. ‌At the same time, finding solutions leads us to really unique partnerships and other solutions that we would not have the opportunity to undertake if we weren’t as strict as we are about our standards.

It’s also true about collaborations and our ecosystem. I think that creativity comes from constraints and so much of the essence of our business has come through collaborative problem-solving in the face of constraints that we really deeply believe in.