For Gauri Sharma, director of strategy and engagement at the Fashion Producer Collective, the reason so many of the industry’s sustainability strategies fail is obvious: they’re not created with input from the people tasked with delivering them—which is to say, the manufacturers.

“Producers are often handed roadmaps and plans that they had no role in shaping, filtered through systems that rarely reflect the reality,” she said at a recent webinar organized by the producer-led sustainability think tank.

Bang for Buck, billed as a producer-led framework for prioritizing decarbonization that doubles as a tool, aims to change that. While slashing the supply chain’s planet-warming emissions is by no means an easy feat, fashion manufacturers aren’t short of “ideas, motivation or energy,” said Sharma, who was previously general manager of ESG and innovation at Shahi Exports in India. What they need—and currently lack—is clarity.

But a vast disconnect often persists between brand strategies and factory actualities. Many programs rely on standardized intervention lists, assuming similar outcomes across suppliers when every facility operates under its own set of constraints, meaning what succeeds in one place could prove a bust in another. Financial returns and carbon impacts can also vary tremendously based on local factors such as energy prices, solar potential, policy, infrastructure and equipment costs.

At the same time, manufacturers are being pulled in multiple directions with few clear commitments to share the financial burden. This might result in modest reductions—good for “nibbling around the edges”—but they’re insufficient for the deep decarbonization the climate crisis demands, said Jimmy Summers, vice president of EHS and sustainability at Elevate Textiles in North Carolina.

He noted that the top-down approach—“brands decide, suppliers do and somebody else pays for it”—is why the industry is stuck.

“Most facilities and suppliers service dozens of brands out of the same facilities, and many times, each brand and retailer has a different approach to decarbonization with different priorities and preferred technologies,” Summers said. “That’s why fashion factories face uncertainty about decarbonization investments and which ones to prioritize.”

The goal of Bang for Buck is to shift the industry away from one-size-fits-all mandates toward strategies grounded in local financial and operational circumstances. Instead of banking on industry averages, the framework models specific technical and financial outcomes by evaluating more than a dozen proven retrofit interventions based on three key criteria: return on investment, carbon reduction potential and facility-specific feasibility. The point is to suss out which initiatives have the highest impact and greatest cost-effectiveness for a specific site.

“A country like Turkey is very different from India. However, it’s also known that two factories within India are completely different in terms of operations, even if they are making the same product,” said Esambadi Nand Gopal, director of climate and energy at Grant Thornton Bharat, the New Delhi-based business consultancy that helped FPC develop the framework.

Pushing a common solution and expecting it to work for every manufacturer won’t cut it at this stage, he added. Instead, the industry needs to look at more customized solutions.

“So we have brought in that facility-level feasibility angle, which helps the manufacturer identify where the highest impact and best cost-effectiveness are—and which measures they should prioritize first—rather than simply jumping into the sea and then looking for what to do,” Gopal said.

What makes Bang for Buck different is that the functional aspect is underpinned by manufacturer-level facility specifications, such as operating data, equipment type, capacity and operating hours, said Kritika Chauhan, senior manager of sustainability and innovations at Shahi Exports.

“Based on all of these details, it gives a strong estimate of what is the financial return, energy savings and carbon reduction potential for a specific intervention,” she said. “Now what that means is that instead of relying on a generic assumption, factories can quickly understand what a solution is likely to deliver in their own context. And this is important because on the ground teams are often dealing with so many possible technologies, upgrades and vendor proposals at one given time. They may know that there are opportunities, but they may not always have the bandwidth, time or internal resources to deeply evaluate each one of those technologies.”

While tools for setting targets and identifying generic solutions are widely available, Chauhan added, what’s missing is a comparative prioritization tool capable of translating broad ambitions into facility-specific financial roadmaps.

“In simple terms, it helps answer one of the most important business questions for suppliers: We have limited capital and many options. Where should we invest first?” she said.

The FPC also crafted specific calls to action for key stakeholders. Producers can use Bang for Buck to flag facility-level decarbonization opportunities, secure internal buy-ins and work with brand partners. Buyers should use the framework to aggregate data, identify roadblocks and offer targeted support. Financial institutions can leverage the framework’s data to transition from project-level financing toward pipeline-based investment solutions, while multi-stakeholder organizations can integrate the framework directly into their existing programs. Nonprofits and civil society groups, for their part, can boost Bang for Buck’s expansion, reinforcing methodology consistency across the manufacturing ecosystem.

“And the sixth and final call to action is for the manufacturers to join us to further develop this tool, because right now we have 22 interventions, but we want to get to about 100 in the next couple of years,” said Vidhura Ralapanawe, executive vice president at Epic Group, which operates factories in Bangladesh, Ethiopia and Jordan and this week opened India’s first net-zero manufacturing unit.

Ralapanawe said that engaging with the framework transforms sustainability from a “hand-waving exercise” into a concrete business case. A brand that wants to reduce its Scope 3 emissions by 10 percent, for instance, can employ the tool to determine exactly how much total investment is required and how that expenditure would affect its overall cost structure.

“For example, the Tier 2 suppliers in Bangladesh have five priority actions, and you can have a conversation with them to find out what is holding them back,” he said. “That understanding is important because without it, we cannot develop a collective action pathway. The idea is not to overgeneralize and say, ‘Everyone has financial needs,’ because the specific finance needs for different subgroups of your supply chain may be very different.”

It’s a common supplier grouse: Decarbonization costs money, yet there are few clear commitments to share the financial burden between buyers and suppliers. 

Addressing those needs might involve different funding workarounds. Instead of just providing direct capital, a brand could help suppliers procure high-efficiency equipment at a lower price through volume discounts. Or an escrow model could be used to underwrite several initiatives at once, effectively keeping the debt off a manufacturer’s balance sheet. In a similar way, a financial institution could underwrite at a portfolio level, aggregating risk and scaling investment.

“What we hope is that instead of going in disparate ways, we can come together to solve a common problem,” Ralapanawe said. “This, I think, was one of the missing pieces for the longest time in our industry to enable the next stage of action.”