When Reformation dreamt up its “climate positive” goal in 2019, the company was in a period of transition. It had recently sold a majority stake to private equity group Permira, and the company’s sustainability team was also grappling with existential dread. Despite publicly positioning itself as a sustainable fashion brand and releasing climate reports every year, two landmark publications from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) in 2019 threw the company’s entire climate strategy into doubt.
“The headline messages were that we were way off track, emissions were rising, and both public and corporate commitments were failing,” says Reformation’s chief sustainability officer and VP of operations Kathleen Talbot. “It was really, really hitting us. We were feeling a lot of anxiety and frustration, and a deep sense of overwhelm.”
Reformation founder and then-CEO Yael Aflalo asked Talbot what the brand could do that would feel like “enough”. Her response? “Remove more emissions than we emit, and have a net-positive impact.” So, in 2020, Reformation set a bold target to become “climate positive” within five years. It was a risky goal. Climate positive still doesn’t have a concrete definition, nor concrete industry guidelines for how to achieve or validate it. Reformation loosely defined it as cutting its carbon footprint as much as possible, and only offsetting what it could not eliminate. It’s not something other brands have run with en masse, and it would require a lot of public learning for Reformation to get right.
There are many things Reformation would have done differently looking back, says Talbot. In the time since Reformation set its targets, the sustainable fashion conversation has moved on. The rush of brands claiming to be “carbon neutral”, “climate positive”, or similar has quieted, as greenwashing regulations tightened and the cracks in carbon offsetting began to show. Reformation’s leadership also changed: Aflalo resigned from the brand in 2020 amid the Black Lives Matter movement, after allegations of racism surfaced. Hali Borenstein, at the time Reformation president, replaced her that June, while keeping the commitment intact.
The combination of better research and tighter legislation has raised the bar on best practice. Because Reformation was growing quickly when it set these targets, it decided to define success in Scope 3 by emissions intensity. But experts now advise brands to reduce absolute emissions, not just the emissions intensity of individual products — the latter discounting overproduction and fashion’s seemingly endless consumption of material resources. “We know intensity versus absolute targets are not the same,” Reformation states in its latest report. “In retrospect, we would have done this differently, tying our targets to units produced, or something like that.”
Five years on, is Reformation climate positive? It’s not a simple answer. But the brand says it is firmly on track, and with an even higher ambition to become fully circular by 2030. Now, the brand is ready to take stock of what it achieved and whether or not climate positive is a real goal that fashion brands should pursue.
What did Reformation achieve — and where did it fall short?
Within six months of making the commitment to become climate positive by 2025, Reformation published a transition roadmap, cobbled together with the limited industry guidance available on net-zero. The sector evolved rapidly, says Talbot, and Reformation had to do a lot of its learning out loud, in public. In 2022, the brand set two science-based targets (verified by the Science-Based Targets Initiative) to make its climate positive mission more concrete. It committed to reducing Scope 1 and 2 greenhouse gas emissions by 42% by 2030, and cutting Scope 3 emissions by 48% per value added (both compared to a 2021 baseline).
On the first target, Reformation fell short. “We saw pretty quickly that we weren’t hitting the Scope 1 and 2 targets. If anything, those emissions were rising,” says Talbot, noting that Reformation was already operating on 100% renewable energy in Scope 1 and 2 in the baseline year, removing what would have been a key lever for change.
“Ultimately, it was never enough to reduce absolute emissions, because our retail footprint was growing at the same time, with 10 to 15 new stores each year,” she says. “In retrospect, that goal [to reduce Scope 1 and 2 emissions] felt unachievable, and it probably wasn’t the right type of goal to set for a high-growth company. It made it very difficult to tell our teams what success looked like, when the target was so off track.”
Once it became clear Reformation would not meet its Scope 1 and 2 targets, it doubled down on Scope 3 reductions to compensate for this. In collaboration with the Apparel Impact Institute (Aii), Reformation says it completed 14 emissions reduction programs with supply chain partners representing 30% to 40% of its overall production (six of these projects were co-sponsored with other brands). This included automated shut-offs and insulating hot water pipes and steam valves, as well as upgraded heating, ventilation and air conditioning (HVAC) systems. But progress was frustratingly slow, Talbot says, even though Reformation was willing to spend time and money unpicking the systemic barriers to change.
The second target saw better traction. Reformation says it is on track to meet its 2030 goal for Scope 3 emissions, having already achieved a 25% reduction by the end of 2025. Last year, its total emissions came to 57,762 metric tons of carbon dioxide equivalent (slightly under the goal of 58,750 metric tons), and it invested in carbon removals to the tune of 71,500 metric tons, around 125% of its total footprint. Its emissions intensity per product also decreased, from 37 pounds in 2021 to 26.3 pounds in 2025 (on average).
Materials are the most material issue
To guide Reformation’s strategy, Talbot identified the four main drivers of emissions in its supply chains: materials sourcing, transportation, energy use in production processes, and a lack of circular practices throughout.
Materials sourcing accounts for roughly 40% of Reformation’s total footprint, says Talbot, which is where the brand started its transformation. Some materials have a higher carbon footprint than others, so Reformation set sub-goals to completely eradicate virgin cashmere and silk, the materials with the highest footprints.
Cashmere represents less than 1% of Reformation’s material volume, Talbot explains, but 20% of its material footprint. Over the past five years, Reformation says it has reduced its carbon footprint from cashmere by 55%, largely by developing recycled cashmere yarns and eliminating the bulk of its conventional cashmere (for the remaining percentage, Reformation says it will explore cashmere cultivated using regenerative agriculture).
Likewise, the brand set out to entirely eliminate virgin silk, but only got halfway. It blames the lack of viable, non-synthetic alternatives available at commercial scale, and says it is now pursuing organic silk as a potential low-impact alternative. (Customer demand for silk grew during this period, Reformation notes. Silk jumped from 1.5% of total materials sourcing in 2021 to 4.7% in 2023, before settling at 3.8% in 2025.)
The work is ongoing. By the end of 2025, Reformation says 97.5% of its fibers were sourced from recycled, regenerative, or renewable inputs. “I cannot underscore this enough,” says Talbot. “If we didn’t do some of our preferred materials transitions, we would not have reached our reduction targets. Even when we look at our go-forward carbon reduction plans, if we don’t keep chipping away at our use of virgin silk and cashmere, there is no clear path to meeting our goals.”
Sustainable transportation vs overproduction
Transportation was another sore spot. Reformation uses a lot of air freight, which it says can be 31 times more carbon intensive than cargo ships. But the trade-off is that air freight allows Reformation to produce smaller batches, replenish only what sells, and avoid overproduction — largely because it is faster, and therefore requires less forward planning. Between 2021 and 2025, Reformation says it reduced air freight from 40% to 33%, increased truck transportation from 60% to 63%, and kick-started ocean freight from zero to 3.5% of shipments. To avoid overproduction, Reformation says it is prioritizing slower ocean freight for “predictable, repeat bestsellers” and heavier styles such as sweaters, denim, and outerwear.
This taps into another change, which Talbot says underpins the entire venture. Over the past few years, Reformation has shifted toward a data-driven, on-demand production model, not unlike ultra-fast fashion giant Shein, or luxury disruptor Rise & Fall. Here, she says the most effective changes were not technological innovations, but organizational infrastructure. Reformation invested heavily in internal education, developing team-specific scorecards tied to achieving carbon goals and tying executive bonuses to sustainability performance.
“Our teams now use carbon modeling and carbon intensity to inform so many decisions, from transportation to lower impact materials and budgeting,” says Talbot. “That wasn’t in the original framework because it didn’t exist before, but it’s really facilitated shifts where we can navigate the trade-offs together. That’s more of a change management framework than anything else, and we’ll take it into this next phase as we try to become fully circular by 2030.”
What comes next?
Moving forward, Reformation says it will continue to invest in decarbonization, using the third-party Climate Label framework (formerly known as Climate Neutral Certified) to develop a “clear climate transition budget”, which will “guide where we invest, how we prioritize action, and how we stay accountable to climate science”.
Now that the climate positive milestone is out of the way (although the decarbonization efforts continue), Reformation is switching gears to focus more squarely on circularity, says Talbot. The brand has a blue-sky goal to become fully circular by 2030, which it defines as trading virgin materials for recycled, deadstock, next-gen, and regenerative ones, while investing in circular business models such as rental and resale to extend the life of existing garments.
The brand has already made some headway, she continues, pointing to partnerships with circular service providers across downcycling, recycling, repair, rental, and resale. Between 2021 and 2025, Reformation says it downcycled 147,232 lbs of factory waste and damaged goods in partnership with Californian social enterprise Homeboy Threads; repaired or altered 21,172 units through its collaborations with Hemster and Sojo; circulated 255,482 units through Rent the Runway; curated and sold 119,482 vintage items through its retail fleet; resold or recycled 1,545,461 units through Thredup and a further 3,074 units through Poshmark; and collectsed 12,217 products for recycling through its internal take-back scheme, Refrecycling. The brand was unable to contextualise these figures in relation to total production volumes.
“What’s nice about this climate milestone is that circular can now take up first position,” says Talbot. “In some ways, it was nice to set targets with bold, feisty messaging, because it shook us all up and forced us to be very efficient. I wouldn’t do it differently, even if the framing probably was a little too aggressive. It’s not easy to prioritize long-term goals, but this milestone helped create the urgency and momentum we needed.”
Correction: Material sourcing represents 40% of Reformation’s total carbon footprint, and roughly 66% of its product carbon footprint. While Reformation did not achieve its Scope 1 and 2 target, the brand says it is ahead of schedule on Scope 3 and therefore “achieved its core ambition”. (April 9, 2026)
