At a New York Climate Week gathering, Hillary Taymour, the founder and creative director of the New York label Collina Strada , described a problem that has dogged fashion’s sustainability push for years. Designers can find materials that are less damaging, but using them at scale is another matter. They cost more, suppliers are hard to locate, and every brand is left to solve the same logistical puzzle alone. That’s even harder for smaller, eco-conscious independent brands like hers.

So could working with one of the largest players in e-commerce, Amazon, actually help startups and smaller labels?

“I think working with a company like this, we can start to really implement more resource channels,” Taymour said of Amazon’s new Climate Pledge Fashion Coalition. “We can utilize resources together and work as a team versus work as an individual brand.”

The coalition, launched through Amazon’s Climate Pledge , brings together more than 60 brands, manufacturers, retailers, material innovators and nonprofit groups around a practical goal: make lower-carbon fashion materials cheap enough to be used beyond small runs and luxury collections. The members include Stella McCartney , Vestiaire Collective , Circ , unspun , BioFluff and Canopy . The premise is pretty straightforward: pool demand from companies that want recycled fibers, plastic-free alternatives and other lower-impact inputs, and suppliers will have enough committed business to build capacity. Higher volumes, in turn, should push prices down.

Why fashion, specifically, for Amazon?

Well, one Amazon has its own fashion lines, and sells countless brands across its platform, though notably its own label is not included in this coalition (at least, yet). But because the company acknowledges that the industry is responsible 2% to 8% of global carbon emissions, consumes around 79 trillion liters of water and produces more than 92 million tons of textile waste each year.

Breaking the Scale Stalemate

The question is whether a coalition can solve the chicken-and-egg problem that has slowed new materials for years. Brands want evidence that a material will be available before committing to it; factories and investors want evidence of committed buyers before spending on new production. Peter Majeranowski , the founder and chief executive of Circ, which is developing technology to recycle textiles, put it bluntly during the panel: “This is a scale problem and this is an infrastructure problem.”

“What financiers want to see are long-term commitments from designers, from fashion brands, large brands, to drive the volume,” Majeranowski said. “But those large brands want to see that the supply is there.” The result, he said, is “a circular problem” that has to be broken through convening and financing.

Stella McCartney, founder and creative director of her namesake label , said the challenge is no longer a lack of ideas. “For over two decades, I’ve worked alongside innovators proving that fashion can be made differently,” she said. “The solutions already exist. What’s been missing is the industry-wide commitment to help them scale. The Climate Pledge Fashion Coalition is about turning innovation into infrastructure, creating real demand for the next generation of materials, and giving the pioneers a pathway from breakthrough to industry standard.”

The coalition is Amazon’s attempt to do that. Its members have access to a Fashion Coalition Lever Library, a database of more than 100 decarbonization solutions, as well as a supplier directory. The group is also working with the World Economic Forum on financing models intended to pair financial institutions and private investors with material projects.

Sally Fouts, who heads The Climate Pledge at Amazon, pointed to the company’s Rivian order as a precedent for the demand signal the group wants to create. When Amazon launched The Climate Pledge in 2019, it committed to buying 100,000 Rivian delivery vans. That gave the manufacturer and its investors confidence that a market existed, Fouts said, allowing Rivian to increase production. More than 50,000 of the vans are now on the road, according to Fouts.

“You have to sometimes make those really big signals to the industry,” she said. When the coalition can tell a supplier, “If you create it, we will buy it,” it gives manufacturers the reassurance needed to build. “Then you scale from there,” Fouts said, adding that the aim is eventually “price parity with the types of materials that we use today.”

That emphasis on price is important. Fashion already has a growing menu of recycled textiles, bio-based fibers and other alternatives. But many are still too costly for brands operating on narrow margins, particularly in the mass market. The industry has become adept at producing capsule collections and runway moments around a new material. It has been much less successful at turning those pilots into the normal way clothes are made.

From Panel to Partnership

Taymour’s experience illustrates both the potential and the limits of those collaborations. Roni GamZon, cofounder and chief commercial officer of BioFluff, said his company met Taymour at a Climate Pledge roundtable during New York Climate Week. The connection led to Collina Strada’s use of Savian by BioFluff, a plastic-free fur alternative, in pieces shown during New York Fashion Week. Those products are expected to reach stores soon.

“The Climate Pledge has been such a great platform to amplify our work at BioFluff,” GamZon said. “We met Hillary Taymour ... during a roundtable event hosted by The Climate Pledge during NY Climate Week, which led to her becoming one of our key collaborators.”

For Taymour, the success of the coalition would be a fashion market in which materials described as healthier and environmentally friendlier are not reserved for the highest-priced labels. Consumers, she said, should be able to tell the difference between a faux fur made with plastic and a plastic-free alternative, and then be able to afford the latter. Her definition of sustainability also reaches beyond materials. It includes the entire supply chain, she said, from production decisions to “being kind to employees” and the people who work for a company.

That broader framing matters because material substitution alone will not decarbonize fashion. The coalition includes a different set of tools, each meant to address a separate failure in the existing system. Circ focuses on recovering fibers after a garment has been used. unspun’s technology aims to reduce waste before a garment is made. BioFluff is developing alternatives to fossil-fuel-based fur. And Vestiaire Collective is arguing that resale should be part of the infrastructure, not an afterthought.

“Joining The Climate Pledge Fashion Coalition ensures resale has a seat at the table in shaping a net-zero future,” Hortense Pruvost, impact director at Vestiaire Collective, said in a statement. “Secondhand holds incredible potential for immediate emissions reduction, making circularity an indispensable pillar of any climate strategy.” Vestiaire Collective, she said, wants to help brands embed resale directly into their value chains.

Arne Arens, the chief executive of unspun, made a similar argument about the need to treat the initiative as a systems project. “As we work toward net zero across every sector, we cannot ignore the impact of the fashion and textile industries, or exclude clothing from the systems we need to transform,” he said. The coalition, he added, offers a chance to combine manufacturing technologies with “shared action to build a cleaner, more resilient future for fashion.”

The Affordability Question

The group’s early membership also points to a central challenge. Many of the best-known brands involved operate at the higher end of the market, while the vast majority of clothing is sold by lower-priced and fast fashion companies. The coalition’s thesis is that once costs fall, those companies will have an easier path in. But that will require much larger purchasing commitments than the fashion industry has historically made to new materials.

Fouts said consumers still have a role in creating that pressure. “Signal the demand,” she said. Amazon’s Climate Pledge Friendly program has seen a 12 percent sales lift for participating brands, according to Fouts. Shoppers can choose products based on their values and ask retailers more questions about materials, she said. Majeranowski’s advice was similar, though directed at everyone in the system: designers and buyers can seek out better materials; consumers can read labels; and investors can recognize the business opportunity in turning waste into value.

For now, the coalition’s biggest test is whether it can translate that shared language into purchase orders and new facilities. Fashion will not change because a new material appears in a small collection. It will change when enough companies agree to buy it, at volumes large enough to remake the economics of the supply chain.