While 2023 has been a challenging year overall, we at Good On You have hit new records and marked some pretty big milestones as we continue to harness the power of our choices to change the fashion industry from the bottom up. Here’s what the Good On You team achieved this year.
Another milestone year for Good On You
2023 hasn’t been smooth sailing, with the cost-of-living crisis still reshaping spending habits and impacting businesses worldwide.
Through all of the ups and downs of 2023, one thing remained unchanged: our commitment to our mission of using the power of consumer choices to drive positive change. This year again, the Good On You team actively worked towards achieving our vision to create a more sustainable future, by empowering millions more consumers and accelerating our impact through strategic partnerships, innovations, and data-driven reporting on the fashion industry.
From rating 6,000+ brands and deploying Good Measures globally to deepening collaborations and actively shaping industry conversations, let’s look back on everything that made this year another milestone for Good On You.
We innovated for impact
This year, we pushed our ratings to new heights; grew our community; and launched and refined innovative tools and platforms to drive progress in the fashion industry—before it’s too late.
We achieved a big milestone with 6,000 brands rated
Accelerating our impact means rating more brands than ever. By the end of the year, we’ll have rated 6,000 brands, a significant milestone. In fact, no one has ever so comprehensively rated so many brands before on publicly available data.
Every single brand we rate undergoes a rigorous evaluation against our comprehensive rating system. Our methodology captures the intricacy of sustainability, analysing up to 1,000 data points across 100 key issues for each brand.
To ensure the utmost integrity, our ratings are based solely on transparent and publicly available information. We rely on credible third-party indices, certification schemes, and standards, along with brands’ own public reporting. Our expert team of analysts verifies and assesses this data meticulously, so consumers can trust that the information is reliable and accurate.
This year, we rated 2,391 new brands, a massive increase compared to previous years. As always, we listened to our community and prioritised brands that our app users requested, including reviewing the ratings of the ten most searched brands on Good On You, to empower them with the information they’re looking for. We also rated brands to help our retail partners measure their portfolio, source brands doing better on important sustainability issues, and promote the leaders with confidence to their customers.
Our community thrived in 2023, with millions using Good On You to make more sustainable choices
This year, over four million people used Good On You to make more sustainable choices. That’s only on our own channels. Many millions more used Good On You’s ratings through our partners, like FARFETCH, Microsoft Bing, and Klarna. And the numbers keep growing.
Simultaneously, our team flourished, growing to 24 individuals, as five new talented members joined the team across tech, ratings, and social media. Good On You remains dedicated to empowering consumers, fostering community growth, and attracting passionate professionals to further our mission.
We kept improving our tools to help you make better choices
In our ongoing commitment to improve user experience and help you make more sustainable choices more easily, we’ve revamped the Good On You directory.
Our updates included improved discovery features for brands selling specific categories and product types, along with the addition of rating-based filters and enhanced functionality for plus-size options. Navigating the directory is now more efficient, allowing you to seamlessly search brands, styles, and countries.
We broadened our impact through strategic partnerships
We improved Good Measures, our sustainability hub for brands
Building on our commitment to empower brands and consumers, Good On You expanded our sustainability hub, Good Measures. Developed in collaboration with FARFETCH, the platform enables brands to review their Good On You rating, get personalised advice on how to improve their sustainability performance, and submit publicly disclosed updates for review by analysts. Last year, the innovative hub rolled out to over 300 FARFETCH brands and was made available to other Good On You partners like Otrium who is actively inviting their brands to the platform.
Many improvements have been made this year to help brands do better, track improvements, and better communicate their achievements to consumers. 88 brands are currently using Good Measures to better understand and improve their impacts, and it is now available to both brand and enterprise customers. If you’re an interested brand, get in touch via our partnerships page.
We launched our Good On You ‘for business’ homepage
We introduced a new partnerships website tailored to serve fashion brands, e-commerce platforms, and retail leaders. The success of our collaborations with Farfetch and Klarna, for example—two key players in the fashion world—is testament to the importance of our mission to empower consumers to make better choices.
A new partnership with retail giant URW marked another significant milestone
We were proud to announce our partnership with Unibail-Rodamco-Westfield (URW), owner of premier retail assets including 75 shopping centres in 12 countries, to co-create a new Sustainable Retail Index (SRI).
The SRI is part of the evolution of URW’s Better Places sustainability roadmap and is the first-of-its-kind index to evaluate retailers’ sustainability commitments, ambitions, and performance across company, product, and store operations levels.
It’s made possible by Good On You’s robust ratings and efficient tech—Good On You assessed 800 brands for URW in eight weeks.
Teaming up with a retail powerhouse like URW means we're now bringing greater transparency to iconic shopping destinations all around the globe—and accelerating the sustainable evolution of the industry. Our partnership marks just the beginning. We’re already planning our work together on future developments of the SRI, especially in expanding its coverage from fashion to other retail branches, starting with beauty.
Sandra Capponi – Good On You co-founder
With Good On You’s trusted sustainability ratings and URW’s global reach, it’s another leap forward towards our big vision: helping consumers vote with their wallets and supporting brands and retailers to do better.
We launched in Japan
Good On You expanded its global reach by partnering with UPDATER in Japan, aiming to facilitate more ethical and sustainable choices for Japanese consumers.
In December, UPDATER launched Shift-C to give Japanese consumers access to Good On You’s comprehensive ratings, and from 2024, will support Japanese brands to use our scalable sustainability hub, Good Measures.
“At Good On You, we want it to be as easy as possible for every consumer to make choices aligned with sustainable outcomes, and partnerships like those with UPDATER help us get there,” says Good On You’s CEO Gordon Renouf.
Collaborative efforts with industry leaders yielded substantial results
Good On You’s strategic collaborations with industry leaders yielded remarkable outcomes, reinforcing our commitment to catalysing positive change within the fashion landscape.
We were proud to see YOOX NET-A-PORTER’s ongoing dedication to sustainability commitments. The Considered Edit on The Outnet, powered by Good On You ratings, played a pivotal role, accounting for an impressive nearly 11% of the total offer on the site in 2022. This showcases the growing influence of more sustainable choices in shaping consumer preferences and purchasing behaviours.
Diving into our extensive data on hundreds of brands for FARFETCH’s Conscious Luxury Report, we uncovered promising trends in the luxury fashion sector’s approach to sustainability. According to the report, searches for conscious-related terms on FARFETCH.com surged by 78% last year. Notably, among the large brands rated by Good On You for FARFETCH, 46% have implemented worker empowerment initiatives.
We led important conversations to catalyse action
In 2023, Good On You not only broadened its impact through strategic partnerships but also continued to lead transformative conversations, setting the stage for a more sustainable and accountable fashion industry.
We pushed our original reporting to new heights
In 2023, Good On You elevated its content, publishing 280 articles to help our community access the latest insights on sustainability in fashion. Our team’s guides, such as our co-founder Sandra Capponi’s exploration of greenhushing, provided in-depth insights, while contributions from journalists and experts—like Megan Doyle’s Needle Movers List—spotlighted emerging technologies and topics, offering compelling perspectives. We also featured book excerpts, such as Andrea Cheong’s Why Don’t I Have Anything to Wear?
We updated our climate change report, the largest survey of its kind in the industry
Our collaboration with Sophie Benson on our deepest data report ever for COP28 looked at new data on an astonishing 5,900 brands’ environmental track records and highlighted the fashion industry’s lack of urgency regarding the climate emergency.
We joined the most important conferences and forums
Good On You’s founders actively participated in crucial industry forums, demonstrating our commitment to transparency and accountability. From Marie Claire to Textile Exchange, Westfield, Fashion Declares Conference, and the Global Fashion Summit, our involvement underscored our role as thought leaders, advocates, and drivers of change within the sustainable fashion movement.
2023 in numbers
Most searched brands
All in all, it’s been another fantastic year for Good On You, and it’s all down to you.
So thank you. Thank you for your support and for helping us change the fashion industry for the better, even when times are tough. We couldn’t do what we do without you, and we can’t wait to see what next year has in store for us and the sustainable fashion movement as a whole. We’re so glad to have you here.
2024 will come with more exciting challenges and changes that we can’t wait to share with you. Bring on 2024!
