Driving Sustainability in Supply Chains

Jag Gill is an MIT alumna, founder and award-winning innovator in technology and sustainability.  At MIT she was awarded the Legatum Fellowship for her research in emerging markets and technology, is a Barclays Unreasonable Fellow and was awarded the NYC Economic Development Corporation Venture Fellowship in 2016 for being a rising star in technology and for driving innovation in the retail industry.  As a serial entrepreneur, she has been institutionally backed by major Silicon Valley VC funds and investors including eBay founder Pierre Omidyar’s impact fund focussed on modern slavery and human rights.  Jag sits on the Board of UN Women’s New York Chapter, the arm of the UN which promotes women’s empowerment and gender equality globally.  She has spoken at the United Nations plenary and SXSW, and has been featured in Forbes, Women’s Wear Daily, Techcrunch, WIRED, Luxury Daily and the New York Times.

$354 billion – that’s the value of “at-risk” products we consume that are made by forced labor including laptops, phones and fashion.  Nobody wants to buy something that was made by exploiting others. In India, girls recruited by agents from low-caste communities are forced to make garments for poor wages, with no health and safety measures, and where verbal and sexual assault are rife. A new model for sustainability in supply chains is needed to tackle labor exploitation, gender discrimination and environmental impacts.  Sundar gathers information from NGO’s, non-profits, multi-stakeholder groups, and governments to provide data-driven insights/analytics in seconds rather than the months it normally takes to assess and act upon, to drive ethical sourcing and sustainable practices in consumer products. We elevate humanity by applying innovation (tools like machine learning, AI and blockchain) to traditional industry practices - and illuminate egregious issues to accelerate positive social and environmental outcomes.

In 2013, Bangladesh’s Rana Plaza building collapse killed 1,132 garment workers and drove 3m consumers to sit up and ask “#WhoMadeMyClothes”.  This tragedy was caused by lack of visibility into factory practices and weak incentives to ensure compliance.  Globally, there are more than 40m garment workers at-risk and apparel production is the most labour intensive, energy consumptive industry.  Industries like retail now seek faster, better processes to comply with emerging government legislation against poor environmental practices, modern slavery and gender discrimination. 

As manufacturing has grown globally in length and complexity, traditional means for protecting workers’ rights have struggled to keep up.  As power has consolidated at the top of industries, companies have been allowed to leverage their purchasing power to benefit from lower prices.  As contractors compete for work on price, workers are squeezed, leading to lower wages, longer working hours and precarious forms of employment.

Post-Covid19, McKinsey reports that 20% of consumers will seek products with sustainable credentials, and 45% look favourably upon companies that prioritize purpose rather than lower prices.  A new model for sustainability in supply chains is needed - to tackle labor abuse, exploitation and environmental impacts and to enable consumers to get transparency into purchases.

Our platform connects consumer brands/retailers with manufactures/suppliers in the value chain, leveraging data, predictive tools and blockchain to drive transparency, scale and sustainability to global sourcing.  The consumer/retail industry is ripe for transformation, business imperatives for sustainability, agility and resiliency cannot be met by existing analogue processes.  Digitization requires analytics, and trust in analytics is predicated on trusted data, increasingly trusted data from multiple independent sources that wwe gather and analyze.  We believe that an open ecosystem of ‘liquid data’, actors in the supply chain, such as consumers, buyers, and increasingly, investors and financiers, will be better able to evaluate the conditions and associated risks, and to make informed decisions. Sundar is a data ecosystem for manufacturer/supplier information across production and sustainability.  Through our digital sourcing platform, we enable more responsible design and sourcing decisions, prioritising the ability to surface materials, products and suppliers with better sustainability standards, and supporting product designers/developers in increasing their influence on supply chains to raise labour and environmental standards.  We integrate assessments, indicators of suppliers’ social, health and safety and environmental sustainability standards in real-time, and adherence to global initiatives like the UN SDG’s, producing analytics and benchmarking using our proprietary, US patent-pending methodology.

As a global and inter-connected multi-sided platform and a multi-stakeholder project, the impact of our work has touchpoints from retail merchandisers in New York City and London to garment workers in Vietnam and social compliance auditors in Bangladesh, to millennial consumers who are evaluating purchases of consumer goods based on their ethics.  Global suppliers and their workers are directly impacted by the purchasing practices of brands/retailers and Sundar aims to raise the capacity of those suppliers, so they perform better socially and environmentally, i.e. work towards paying a living wage and implement wastewater management systems.  Additionally, we empower product designers, buyers and sourcing professionals to source more responsibly and influence social and environmental impacts across value chains like textiles, apparel and consumer goods – over 80% of the social and labor footprint fort consumer products like shoes and accessories occurs in the design phase.

We engage our end-users, industry groups, multi-stakeholder initiatives and organisations that advocate for fair labour and sustainable production practices and whom have connections with conditions in the field as a way to gain clearer insight into the needs of the people whom our solution intends to reach and ensure we are taking the right approach.

Our project tackles the core dimensions of the prize head on, and driving new incentives for pressing issues in workers rights and environmental impacts.  e.g. We are building tools and capacity in SME businesses in emerging markets to consider living wage for their workers as strategic issues that will benefit business, workers and customers collectively; we are providing innovation and digital tools that enable businesses to connect to global customers and we are building connectivity opportunities that mean sustainable business, and fair social and labor practices get rewarded despite economic downturns and demand and supply side shocks.

Our team has focussed on supply chain technologies for over half a decade.  The lack of visibility of Western consumer brands and retailers into their factories, dispersed globally mainly across Asia-Pacific, has allowed for labor violations and abusive social and environmental practices, such as forced labour, child labour, involuntary overtime for workers where women are most vulnerable, and unauthorized sub-contracting.  We set out to diagnose and understand these issues deeply supported by partners such as Humanity United, the impact-fund of eBay founder Pierre Omidyar focussed on modern slavery.  Today, the apparel supply chain is our main focus given the catastrophic impact of COVID19 on garment workers lives, wages and human rights, given cancelled orders and supply chain disruptions.  The pandemic has created a humanitarian crisis in places like Bangladesh and India and where issues around living wage are now at the forefront of the crisis and need to be addressed.  Garment workers themselves are publicizing the disparity of wages and are becoming activists to spread the message of unfair and illegal labor practices.

I spent the Winter term as a master’s student at MIT Sloan in Rajasthan, India (my ethnic roots are from North India), with a local artisan community learning about their craftsmanship and challenges of scaling and accessing global markets.  What began as a research project around inclusion in business and small-scale manufacturers, became a venture-backed start up with the goal of building a digital supply chain for creative industries predicated on transforming supply chains to the speed-to-market, responsiveness and the sustainability standards demanded by today’s consumers in apparel.  Our team is passionate about scaling sustainable solutions and we see clear opportunities for engagement that have not been explored fully between business and civil society.  Sustainability has always been built into our model, since we focus on identifying and meeting business needs as well as worker needs. By connecting buyers and suppliers, improving risk management, and improving business efficiencies, we are addressing the long-term strategic needs of global brands, retailers and suppliers and manufacturers, i.e. improving productivity, social compliance, and access to markets.  We are excited to build a new model of business engagement - a cooperative model that supports workers and business.

I am an MIT alumna, an award-winning innovator in technology, retail and sustainability.  At MIT, I was awarded the Legatum Fellowship for research in emerging markets, and digital inclusion and technology, and was awarded the NYC Economic Development Corporation Venture Fellowship in 2016 for driving innovation in apparel & retail.  The ventures I founded have been institutionally backed by leading Silicon Valley investors including NEA, one of the largest venture capital funds in the world, and the foundation of Pierre Omidyar, eBay founder, focused on modern slavery.  I have recruited a best-in-class team across technology and sustainability to embolden and deliver on our mission and vision.  Our tech lead has broadly influenced many of the technologies underlying the modern web playing a significant role in the development of the HTML, HTTP, XML, XSL, DOM, XPath, SVG, XQuery and XLink standards, and in building some of the earliest prototypes and implementations of the technologies. He is considered “the father of I18N on the WWW”.  I founded Sundar after a decade-long international finance career where, as a senior executive working as trusted advisor to some of India’s leading apparel industrialists, I uncovered a paradox:  the opacity, complexities and inefficiencies of the fashion supplychain was at odds with the fast pace of consumer demand for on-trend apparel.  This became the white space from which Sundar was borne.  I also sit on the Board of UN Women – NY Chapter, the part of the UN which promotes women’s empowerment and gender equality globally.

There are a few mantras that I follow that have served me well.  “Fail to prepare, prepare to fail” is one.  The other is - “Shoot for the moon. Even if you miss, you'll land among the stars.”  I think both describe the tenacity and vision that I have needed to drive our mission and vision for a fairer, more equitable and humanitarian workplace for workers across the world.  One of the challenges that we are facing is right now – Covid19 may put the brakes on many sustainability and engagement projects as businesses, especially in hard hit areas in Asia as well as here in the US, are struggling to survive.  This is the moment when worker rights and welfare are the most fragile and need to be advocated for.  So, right now we are working harder to engage with businesses, non-profits, civil society groups and governments to further our work in the face of adversity.  I believe that keeping the mission, vision and values of the work of the organization at the centre can ensure that myself and our team can get through this adversity and challenge. 

In my capacity as board-member of UN Women - New York Chapter, the arm of the UN which promotes women’s empowerment and gender equality globally, I have been able to combine engagement on critical issues for women and girls across education, employment, career advancement, welfare, human rights and economic prosperity, and fuse it with my passion for innovation and technology.  The number of women in technology that are getting funded by investors to build disruptive businesses seems discouraging - venture capital investment in all-female founding teams represented only 2.8% of capital invested across the entire U.S. start-up ecosystem in 2019.  Female entrepreneurs continue to struggle to raise as much capital as their male counterparts and build businesses.  As a venture-backed start-up founder who has gone on to be funded by some of the largest venture capitalists in the world, and as woman of color, I feel grateful that not only am I able to take steps towards correcting this disconnect in resources for women globally in technology and innovation, I am also building a business predicated on the triple bottom line of people, planet and profit.

Our platform connects consumer brands and retailers with manufacturers and suppliers in the supply chain, leveraging data, predictive tools and blockchain to drive transparency, scale and sustainability to global sourcing – a fusion of user-centred product design and technology capability that is leapfrogging current solutions.  Apparel and retail supply chains are going through sea changes, driven by sustainability, agility and efficiency needs. COVID19 exposed systemic flaws which will accelerate technology adoption.  This is a perfect storm emphasizing the need for analytics driven by trusted data.  Our work is unique and disruptive as we are building global “reputation” networks for supply chain transparency, and supply chain resiliency cannot be met by current analogue processes or the patchwork of disparate technology solutions that currently exist and that are not scalable.  We deliver on the key drivers and shifts that industries will confront over the next decade, today, namely:

1.     Coronavirus Effect: demise of retail will catalyze tech adoption across supply chain to make products cheaper, faster and better.  

2.     Tsunami of new global legislation: protecting environment and enforcing human rights practices from UK Modern Slavery Act to Dutch Law to California.

3.     GenZ shifts towards sustainable and ethical practices:  87% millennials will now pay more for sustainably sourced products.

4.     Major retail players demand 50% of products to be made sustainably by 2025 – $100 billion in combined future sales.

TOC Mission:  To improve working conditions and environmental impacts across consumer product supply chains, starting with apparel, through a centralised, digital sourcing platform.

Desired Outcomes:

Stakeholder Engagement to Drive Sustainability

Buyers empowered to make better sourcing decisions through knowledge gained via Sustainability Tool and use of Sundar as primary platform to surface 1000s of the most sustainable suppliers in the industry

Improvement in Working Conditions

Social and Environmental risks better managed by 1,000s of suppliers who are committed to industry best practice initiatives. Incentivised by higher sustainability scores, driven by recommendations of Brands/Buyers/Designers & measured by facility improvement in key action areas i.e. gender empowerment, over time.

Speed to Market

Brands/retailers connected w/ suppliers through digital platform, facilitating business at speed but not compromising sustainability standards demanded by consumers.

Dynamic Platform Providing Robust Data & Insights

Real-time, cont. assessment of suppliers’ social and enviro sustainability standards to drive continuous improvement, provision of unique insights/data to users and incorporation of new technologies like Blockchain to realise innovations in traceability.

Pathways of Change:

Building Supplier Awareness: Establish a tech-driven system where suppliers are incentivized to participate in robust, transparently reporting initiatives (i.e. ILO BW, LWG, GOTS) by promoting their efforts to top brands/ retailers, who expect/demand  strong efforts to address modern slavery and for better labor/environmental standards.

Reward Greater Effort: Sundar Digital tools integrate assessments of suppliers’ likely social, health, safety and environmental sustainability standards in real time, awarding higher sustainability scores for greater effort, benchmarking performance against peers and motivator to catalyze change.

Encouraging Supplier Effort: Support designers/buyers to encourage supplier engagement to key initiatives through customized messaging system layer of Sustainability Tool, which provides a template for communication to motivate continuous improvement.

Critical Assumptions:

Consumer Brands have no efficient and easily-scalable ways to express procurement preferences for high-quality, responsible suppliers.

Transparency Movement has inspired industry change but there remains a lack of communication b/n NGOs, initiatives, certifications and Fashion designers/buyers, whom have great impact on the supply chain.

Designers/buyers lack of communication with suppliers at origin of product mean sourcing habits remain unchanged.

Today, we are currently supporting visibility into 15,000 global suppliers and manufacturers; in one year we will reach 30,000 and in five years over 50,000.  We generate almost 2million data points that we manage and measure and this is growing daily.  By the end of 2020, we will support 50% of one of Europe’s largest retail markets which is over 100+ brands and retailers driving over $15billion in national revenues.  By 2025, our goal is to support over $200bn of global revenue in apparel retail alone, given our projected penetration In the Western Europe and US retail markets.  Key is our mission of democratizing access to supply chain data at scale, and responsible sourcing tools to the long-tail of SME manufactures, suppliers, brands and smaller retailers who do not have access to ethical sourcing tools today due to capital and resource limitations.  Trends toward transparency are not slowing down and as the trend further expands and deepens, so does the scale of our reach.

Vision:

To improve working conditions and environmental impacts across Supply Chain through a centralised digital sourcing platform connecting consumer brands and retailers with global suppliers and manufacturers.  We drive the speed-to-market, responsiveness and sustainability standards demanded by today’s consumers.

Mission:

Implement solutions enabling better design and sourcing decisions, prioritizing the ability to surface materials, products and suppliers likely to have higher ethical and environmental sustainability standards, supporting product designers and developers in increasing their influence on supply chain sustainability.

By 2025, our goal is to drive sourcing of over $200bn of global revenue in retail & consumer products, given our projected penetration In the Western Europe and US retail markets, through suppliers and manufactures on our platform that are deemed to have superior sustainable practices and to build capacity across the value chain for improved impacts.  A large part of this will be through enabling the supply chain operating to our high standards of social and environmental impacts to charge fair prices for their products and that buyers have improved purchase practices, and for that to cascade down to workers being paid a fair, living wage for their region and investment and capital into safe working conditions as well as into processes and practices that have better environmental impacts such as dying, finishing and water usage.  Our model of sustainability will thus be systemic and circular – driving systems level changes from purchase practices and payments all the way through to capital and investment in factories and processes. 

The retail and sourcing industries are dealing with Covid19 impacts and these are the main barriers towards accomplishing our goals in 2020 and until 2025.  These are financial, structural and market issues. The pandemic has put the lights out for many SME manufacturers and suppliers in markets like India, China and Bangladesh, with government small-business support obsolete. 

In an industry undergoing real-time demand collapse and seismic supply shocks, where does sustainability sit?  Post-pandemic, there will be a conundrum; consumers are thinking hard about their choices and the need for a more sustainable way of life after Coronavirus, making choices based upon values.  On the other hand, many in the apparel industry will not have the resources to invest in transparent supply chains and responsible sourcing programs in a meaningful way.

Foot traffic to U.S. stores fell 58.4% in late March.  Online retailers from high-end to athleisure showed deep discounts of over -30% in the past weeks, crushing revenues and profitability and leading to many company liquidations and insolvencies. 

And if there are any category winners – perhaps value players and discount retailers – sustainability is not always an agenda item.  As priorities for retailers and manufacturers focus on survival, sustainability will need to re-invent itself in the supply chain as a cheaper, faster, better model driven by innovation and easy to adopt tech and transparency tools, which is a key benefit of SUNDAR’s approach.

Sustainability will need to re-invent itself in the supply chain as a cheaper, faster, better model driven by innovation and easy to adopt tech and transparency tools, which is a key benefit of SUNDAR’s approach.  We are driving a cheaper, faster, better model of innovation and sustainability and addressing the triple bottom line of people, planet and profitability directly.

We partner with many organizations across multi-stakeholder initiatives, NGO’s, non-profits, trade groups, governments and global industry bodies.  We are currently formalizing relationships to access information and data and to incorporate this within our system and platform, we are forming partnerships to drive user activation and engagement. 

Our partners can be shared on request.

Our business model can be shared on request.

Our financial projections can be shared on request.  Our business model has multiple and recurring revenue streams and we are generating revenues.

Our raised funds can be shared on request.  We have raised institutional capital and we have been awarded grant funding from DFID, and the European Commission for our innovative solutions around improving purchase practices towards responsible sourcing.

Our funding strategy can be shared on request.

Our budget and estimated expenses can be shared on request.

The Elevate Prize can help us accelerate adoption and activation of our solutions in the industry based on the rich network of advisers and advocates.  We specially are seeking to build and nurture relationships globally in South-East Asia and Latin America as well as Africa, regions that the breadth and depth of the Prize’s network can support us in accelerating.  We would be thrilled and proud to partner with the Elevate Prize and would be strong advocates in supporting all the Global Hero's to drive their respective missions and visions leveraging our personal and professional networks and support them.

We would like to partner with organizations that further the UN’s SDGs as we have developed a unique capability to drive SDG adoption into our measurement criteria of supplier and vendor capability.  We would like to partner with global data providers including governments and MIT labs and spin-offs who are generating data at scale that we can use.   We would be happy to share more data on request.

We would be happy to share more details on request.