These Tools Help Consumers Mythbust Brands’ Greenwashing Claims
Consumers have set their sights on sustainable shopping.
However, greenwashing, which aims to convince consumers that a company’s products and operations are environmentally friendly, is still rampant—and many consumers can be challenged to cipher the difference between real and false claims.
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According to 2022 data from The Harris Poll, taken for Google Cloud, 58 percent of global executives in the C-suite or at the VP level said their organizations are guilty of greenwashing.
That makes shopping more sustainably an arduous task for consumers.
With this problem in mind, Gordon Renouf, co-founder and CEO of Good on You, and his team created an app and a website—which, combined, now have over one million users monthly—to help consumers understand how well or poorly brands are addressing environmental considerations.
Stronger consumer understanding could also force brands to change, he said.
“The idea was not only to serve consumers, but to empower consumers to influence brands to change their behaviors to get better outcomes for people and the environment, which is ultimately what the majority of consumers who care about these issues are interested in,” Renouf said.
Each brand on Good on You receives a rating: “We Avoid,” “Not Good Enough,” “It’s a Start,” “Good” or “Great.” While the company uses up to 1,000 data points to assign a rating, the three key categories it collects information on are people, planet and animals. The platform uses technology to gather the data, which then is analyzed by one of Good on You’s experts, using a strict rubric, to determine the appropriate rating.
Renouf, who previously worked with Australian Consumer Reports as a consumer advocate, said each brand’s rating depends on publicly available information.
“When you frame it as consumers…care about how the things they buy impact people [and] the planet and animals, then it follows that brands have an obligation to tell consumers and to be transparent about the production processes and how [they] impact those issues that their customers care about,” Renouf said. “If you’re not being transparent about it in ways which are accountable—which have to be specific, concrete, relevant—then, in functional terms, you get no points. You don’t get any credit for doing something which you’re not telling people about.”
The platform partners with several other companies, like Farfetch, a digital marketplace for luxury brands, which uses Good on You’s ratings to guide consumers toward “conscious” brands, like Veja and Vivienne Westwood, on its site.
And Klarna, a financial services company known for its buy-now-pay-later function, has used Good on You to implement a “Sustainable Collections” feature on its app, promoting brands that have received positive ratings.
Meanwhile, other partners like Unibail-Rodamco-Westfield, which owns Westfield Malls in Europe and North America, have partnered with Good on You on a Sustainability Retail Index, which allows URW to understand the sustainability commitments and performance of its tenant retailers.
Renouf said the majority of the profit Good on You turns comes from partnerships like these. However, the platform also earns profits from commission on editorial posts it releases. Renouf said brands that Good on You promotes have scored well against the platform’s rubric.
“Only if you have a rating of four or five would we possibly consider offering you the opportunity to be promoted through our content—and, of course, we’re very careful to disclose that,” he explained.
The majority of the brands that are rated four or five—good or great—by Good on You’s standards are smaller names, Renouf said. Only a small handful of large brands, like Patagonia and Eileen Fisher, have earned a “good” rating.
The brands that score the best, he noted, often have sustainability baked into their ethos from Day One.
“They actually said, ‘I woke up and I wanted to create a sustainable fashion brand,'” Renouf said.
Of the 6,000 brands Good on You has rated, about 1,200 of them are large brands. Renouf said the Good on You team re-evaluates large brands every 12 months and checks in on smaller brands every 18 months, which helps ensure the platform has the most up-to-date information possible for consumers to peruse.
However, if a brand has questions about the way it has been rated or wants to dispute its rating, Renouf said the Good on You team may reconsider if presented with publicly available evidence that the rating should be more positive.
“If there was a big scandal about a brand, we might take another look at it. If a brand wrote to us and said, ‘We have implemented [a] significant number of things and our performance has drastically improved, we will take a look—particularly if it’s a popular brand with consumers.”
Renouf said, as of now, the most popular searches on Good on You include Nike, H&M, Zara and other fast-fashion brands. That aligns with data from a FashionUnited index, which shows that all three of those brands are among the top 10 most valuable global fashion brands.
Renouf said Good on You will aim to rate 10,000 total brands by the middle of 2024.
Other platforms have similar information for consumers to benchmark against. The Good Shopping Guide offers consumers the chance to look into a small selection of fashion brands, while Eco-Stylist has curated a “community” of ethical, sustainable brands for consumers to browse during their online shopping.
Cluey Consumer, a young, New Orleans-based startup, offers a similar benefit to curious customers; it uses Good on You’s data, in aggregation with other information, like B Corp status and regulatory filings, to dole out ratings—A through F—to brands based on their “people impact” and “planet impact.” Unlike Good on You, Cluey works to rate brands across all categories, not just apparel.
Maryclaire Manard, Cluey’s founder and CEO, said the platform shows consumers between 600 and 700 brands that touch the textile industry—from fashion and apparel to home. It has an app, a website and a desktop browser extension consumers can use for brand ratings. In the future, Manard said, the company will release a mobile browser extension, since so much of consumers’ shopping occurs via mobile devices.
The company focuses on companies that have proven popular with the American consumer.
“We’re trying to mostly focus on really well-known fashion brands that are sold in the U.S., or maybe some more niche brands that are great alternatives to those more status quo brands. So, [for instance], Nike—okay, what’s a great alternative to Nike? Levi’s, what’s a great alternative to Levi’s?”
The platform also shows consumers attributes about the founders and owners of the brands, where applicable. It has special badges to indicate black-owned or woman-owned businesses.
Like Good on You, Cluey offers an affiliate program to top-rated brands.
Manard said any brand earning a “B” is doing well; on a company’s Cluey profile, consumers are offered an alternative for brands that don’t score highly.
“A’s are almost impossible to get—I’m struggling to think of a brand that has straight A’s across Cluey’s rating system. But anything that’s a B-minus or higher on both people and planet impacts is considered top rated on our platform, so we really try to help people discover some of these amazing brands,” Manard explained.
