The Sustainable Fashion Forum Repositions Flagship Conference Around Consumer Behavior, Targeting the Industry's Widening Adoption Gap
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
The Sustainable Fashion Forum Repositions Flagship Conference Around Consumer Behavior as Industry Faces Growing Sustainability Adoption Gap
PORTLAND, OREGON(October 15, 2025) — The Sustainable Fashion Forum today announced SFF26, a three day industry conference taking place October 28 to 30, 2026 in Portland, Oregon. The event will focus on a central challenge facing the fashion industry: translating sustainability systems into consumer participation.
Over the past decade, the fashion industry has invested significantly in sustainable systems and infrastructure. Yet consumer participation has remained limited. Programs launch but struggle to scale, initiatives stall, and products underperform because adoption is not automatic. It has to be designed.
The conference is organized around what founder Brittany Sierra calls the “infrastructure-participation gap,” the disconnect between the sustainability systems the industry has built and the rate at which consumers actually use them. SFF26 will address this through The Science of Adoption, a programming framework that applies behavioral science to the specific challenges sustainability, marketing, and product teams face.
“If you work in sustainability, you’re in the behavior change business,” said Sierra. “Most sustainability leaders are trained to build systems, not engineer participation. The result is programs that perform well on paper but underperform in the real world. For years, we’ve assumed that if we build it, they will come. But adoption isn’t automatic. It has to be designed, culturally reinforced, and tested against real behavior.”
Conference Programming
SFF26 will bring together 400 professionals across sustainability, marketing, product, innovation, policy, and strategy roles, alongside behavioral scientists and consumer psychologists, to focus on how insights from human behavior can inform the design of sustainability initiatives that people actually adopt.
“This isn’t a conference about marketing sustainability more effectively,” Sierra said. “It’s about aligning systems change with behavior change and giving teams practical tools to design for participation, increase adoption, and tie sustainability to real business outcomes.”
Programming will explore why stated values often fail to predict purchasing behavior, how brands can design sustainability initiatives that align with real consumer decision-making, and how sustainability teams can work with marketing and product functions to increase adoption.
The SFF26 Intelligence Report
Following the conference, the Sustainable Fashion Forum will publish the SFF26 Intelligence Report, synthesizing insights from sessions and partner contributions into a working industry document. The report will include case studies, expert perspectives, and actionable recommendations designed to help organizations translate sustainability goals into measurable consumer participation.
For full conference information, ticket registration, and program updates, visit www.thesustainablefashionforum.com.
Media Contact:
Media inquiries: hello@thesustainablefashionforum.com
About the Sustainable Fashion Forum
The Sustainable Fashion Forum is an annual conference in Portland, Oregon that brings together mid-to-senior level professionals across the fashion value chain to surface the friction points holding sustainability back and translate complexity into actionable strategy.
Past SFF speakers include leaders from Vestiaire Collective, eBay, Reformation, PVH, Allbirds, Gap Inc., Rothy's, Adidas, Nordstrom, Everlane, and more.
Founded by Brittany Sierra, named one of Vogue Business' 100 Innovators in Sustainability, SFF has built its reputation over nearly a decade by going deeper into the nuanced, gray-area conversations with curiosity, optimism, and commercial realism.
