humangear makes clever camping, organization, and outdoor utensils and gear to help people lead more re-useable lifestyles.
The San Francisco-based company’s robust supply chain and product line-up means it has a complex emissions footprint to wrap its arms around. When it comes to reporting on its efforts to large outdoor retailers like REI, which tend to be environmentally focused and require suppliers to disclose emissions and ESG initiatives, humangear has a lot to consider—from its shipping practices to its materials and packaging. Based on its sustainability maturity and savvy—humangear has warehouses in the U.S., Europe, and Asia, where the majority of its supply chain also operates—you might not guess that the company is made up of just five full-time staff.
To hear more about humangear’s sustainability journey, we met with Katrin Ward, humangear’s CFO, who has also taken the lead on the company’s carbon calculations (when she’s not also playing the role of the company’s hand model) and Jordan Hurder, humangear’s COO who’s focused on relationships with customers, product packaging, and sustainability practices and guidelines.
Our conversation was edited for clarity and length.
Sustain.Life
What are the main sustainability or emissions measurement challenges you had before you brought on Sustain.Life as a platform?
Katrin Ward
In looking for a platform to use, we found it challenging to find one that was designed for a business of our size and with our bandwidth while also getting clarity into how our footprint was being calculated.
For us, it was important—especially the first year that we worked with Sustain.Life—to really dive deep and understand our calculation. The hope was that we weren’t just calculating every year and offsetting some of that—we’re calculating our emissions and understanding things we can do internally to change the size of our footprint. If we don’t have any visibility into where the vast majority of our footprint’s coming from, there’s no hope in changing that. Sustain.Life has helped us have more visibility into downstream and upstream freight, which is a significant portion of our footprint.
Jordan Hurder
We previously looked into working with other climate emissions companies, but for a company our size, they basically had a standard calculation that they used, and the price [for offsets] felt completely arbitrary. We just didn’t understand how they came up with their numbers—it just didn’t seem real. I don’t want to just pay to make the problem go away. So, it’s been helpful getting more visibility.
A lot of the reductions that we make in emissions are expensive and a lot of the calculators directly correlate the amount you spend on your goods with your carbon footprint. If we, for example, use 100% carbon-neutral, renewable plant-based material in all our products, many calculators would actually show our carbon footprint increasing because these products cost significantly more. This is challenging because we don’t want to manipulate the calculator by using the cheapest, dirtiest, petroleum-based products with an obscure supply chain in order to reduce our goods’ cost. Obviously we wouldn’t do that, but if a calculator suggests that we’re on the right track in that scenario, there’s a problem in the methodology.
Sustain.Life
Are there any other changes you’ve made from measuring your emissions?
Katrin Ward
At this point, the big one for us has been seeing the difference between ocean and air freight. We were aware of the emissions difference between these in the background, but seeing the carbon footprint result of those decisions has helped us put more head space into planning ahead in terms of purchasing. We have also started to switch some of our packaging materials to be more environmentally friendly.
Jordan Hurder
In 2021, when the supply chain was in complete disarray, we had no choice but to air freight goods a lot, knowing it was detrimental to the environment and the emissions per unit we were selling. Now that the supply chain has eased up, we’ve invested more energy into forecasting, advanced planning, and building relationships with freight providers to almost eliminate air freight. It’s now down about 70-80% compared to a couple of years ago.
With Sustain.Life, the weight of the goods we’re moving is factored in, which is beneficial because our goods are lightweight and dense, which from the start is advantageous from an emissions standpoint.
Sustain.Life
Switching gears a little—in terms of emissions data—what’s being asked of you by the retailers you work with?
Jordan Hurder
This conversation got pushed into high gear in 2019 after we visited a major European outdoor trade show. Europe is ahead of the U.S. on many of these initiatives. It’s not just big retailers there—everyone is asking about this. The whole market is moving in a direction where they want to see that from companies.
humangear’s sustainability platform has always placed emphasis on emissions. Still, they’re not the only part because our product line is designed around changing user behavior around disposable things. Even if our products have a higher carbon footprint or are made with some petroleum-based material, we still think that’s preferable if it’s one product that lasts forever, instead of things that break but might be plant-based or things that are zero-emissions but might not work very well.
REI deserves credit for pushing the industry forward, too. They stand out among the big retailers we work with. They also emphasize diversity in marketing, cultural appropriation work, and, increasingly, sustainability. They are also pushing for eliminating harmful chemicals in products. At first, they were asking about what we were doing around emissions in a general sense. Now it’s about adhering to emissions targets, decreasing emissions, and adopting industry sustainability standards.
Sustain.Life
Are there other retailers you’re working with that have similar standards, or by adhering to REI’s standards, are you set up for success with other retailers?
Jordan Hurder
Generally, for the outdoor industry, if you’re getting a good sustainability score with REI, you’re probably fine for most, but there are channels or verticals that might require further steps, zero waste refill stores, for instance.
Sustain.Life
humangear is a small company, and tackling these big challenges—what have you learned that you might pass on to other companies looking to make progress in their ESG or sustainability efforts?
Jordan Hurder
I definitely don’t want to position myself as an expert, however, there are opportunities to address your carbon footprint that can save you money. The freight question is a good example. We put a lot of effort and energy into forecasting—making sure our logistics are set up so that we can place orders months in advance and have those goods in our warehouse when they’re needed. Sometimes circumstance forces your hand if there’s a significant order that a customer needs urgently or there’s a supply chain breakdown and you can’t book ocean freight on ships. Having been through that in 2020-2021, we now know what to do because we’ve put so much effort into trying to build our supply chain around not relying on the accelerated timeline you get from air shipping or from shipping less than container loads, and that saves us money.
We’re still working on other things, such as switching to recycled paper or FSC-certified paper for our packaging that has a minimal cost impact. We’re still able to make progress by optimizing a lot of the business processes to eliminate carbon-intensive procedures or operations.
Katrin Ward
One of the reasons we can address sustainability is because Sustain.Life has worked with us to do an annual calculation. We don’t have to be on the platform constantly.
It’s important to us to have that calculation, so we dedicate one or two months a year to inputting our data—after that, we can put it away. In the back of our minds, we’re always thinking about improving freight and packaging, but in terms of the actual calculation, we just don’t have time to calculate the number every month. So it’s been great to work with Sustain.Life, which allows us to do that.
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Sustain.Life
As a company do you think about future regulations, or have the mandates from your suppliers affected your operations more?
Jordan Hurder
I get the sense the outdoor industry is lightyears ahead of anything the government will do. But Europe is further ahead than the U.S. in terms of government regulations in their outdoor industries, and expectations from stores and customers even surpass those regulations. So, it seems like wherever the outdoor industry is operating, it’s always a few steps ahead of what the government will require.
Sustain.Life
What do you want others to know about humangear from a sustainability standpoint—the initiatives you’re taking on internally or externally?
Jordan Hurder
I want people to know that humangear’s approach to sustainability is holistic. We don’t see emissions reduction as the only thing a company should be doing. We don’t see material improvement as the only thing a company should be doing. For us, it’s about making products that people want to use, that they enjoy using, and thus are motivated in terms of changes in behavior and re-examination of where reusable products can replace disposables. Then figuring out how to make those products in a way that they don’t break because having to make something twice is worse.
Once we’ve knocked down those dominos, how can we optimize the manufacturing to continue to push on the sustainability front or incorporate plant-based components? We’re excited about incorporating closed-loop processes, like sending scrap material back to that factory for reuse. We try to close the loop with our customers where if anything does break, they can send it back to us, and we work with specialty recyclers that can grind up silicone which is not a recyclable material. So, this is an important part of a larger holistic process to help move people’s lifestyles in a sustainable direction.
Katrin Ward
I would just add that it’s really important to us to understand how things work from a recycling and operational standpoint. As a team, we’ve visited Recology, which is San Francisco’s recycling center, to understand what we are doing in San Francisco. It helps us understand what we can do with our own packaging. For example, we learned from Recology that separating the paper from the plastic, for example clamshell plastic from paper packaging, makes the recycling of both parts easier. If they’re still attached, it’s much harder for a recycler to deal with them. As Jordan said, it’s holistic and we are trying to be aware of everything we can do—the small things as well as the big.
Sustain.Life
This has all been great insight that a lot of folks can learn from. We appreciate you both taking the time to share!
