Boardroom Stories | Driving Sustainability at SOIL with Better Cotton - video Dailymotion

Soil Institute of Management

At the School of Inspired Leadership (SOIL), we believe in shaping leaders who champion sustainability and responsibility in every sphere. In this edition of Boardroom Stories, we highlight how SOIL collaborates with Better Cotton to create meaningful impact, foster sustainable practices, and nurture leaders committed to building a better future. Watch how sustainability is lived, taught, and practiced at SOIL.

Transcript

00:00One of the favorite stories that I share with my students is the story of how IKEA achieved

00:11sustainability by using something called better cotton. Now sustainability is a problem that

00:15every company faces and IKEA was very serious about sustainability right from the beginning

00:18and they wanted to move all their cotton consumption into organic cotton. But most

00:23companies as you know work with organic cotton in a way in which they buy organic cotton at very

00:28high prices because it's very difficult to produce organic cotton the yield is very low and then they

00:32end up charging a huge premium to the customer and customers buy it only because they want to

00:36assuage their guilt but very few customers can afford high priced organic cotton products. IKEA

00:40decided that they would change this approach to sustainability because they decided they would

00:44somehow try to buy cotton at the same price which will enable them to sell better cotton to customers

00:49at the same price as they were earlier selling. Then of course it's a no-brainer that a customer

00:53will buy a sustainable product at the same price and the volumes could be massive it could generate

00:57huge increase in growth so IKEA analyzed the production of cotton realized that farmers are

01:01using way too much fertilizer and pesticide and water worked together with WWF and a few other

01:06companies which got together an initiative called better cotton and in 2005 they launched this project

01:10they taught farmers how to farm using less of fertilizer but pesticides and water and made sure that

01:16they got the same yield so the farmers could actually sell cotton at the same price they'd actually

01:21make more profit even by selling at the same price because the consumption of these key materials was less

01:25this enabled IKEA to buy cotton at the same price that we were they were buying cotton from before

01:29this gave IKEA volumes they guaranteed farmers all across Asia and South America they taught them how

01:35to grow cotton like this signed long-term contracts with farmers and used that purchasing to build it

01:40across their supply chain all textile suppliers of IKEA and at the end of the day IKEA is a much bigger

01:44company selling more product and remaining as profitable as before that's the story of how you can turn

01:49sustainability challenge into an opportunity for growth

Boardroom Stories | Driving Sustainability at SOIL with Better Cotton

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