Oct 28 – 30, 2026 · Hyatt Regency Portland
Program Preview
Opening Night
Welcome & Networking
Kick off SFF26 by connecting with peers who understand both the challenges and opportunities facing our field. This is your chance to share insights, compare notes, and start the conversations that will carry through the next two days and shape what comes next for sustainable fashion.
Day 1
Understanding the Adoption Gap
Why Better Solutions Don’t Guarantee Adoption
Fashion has spent years investing in better materials, technologies, systems, and sustainability initiatives, yet progress is slowing, momentum is fading, and leaders are under increasing pressure to demonstrate clear business value. Drawing on the latest consumer and market intelligence from Kantar, this opening address will unpack why these investments don’t always translate into adoption, why the stakes are higher than ever, and why a deeper understanding of demand is essential for sustainability initiatives to gain traction and sustained support within the business.
Behavioral Blind Spots: Why Sustainability Strategies Miss the Mark
Sustainability strategies are often built around assumptions about what motivates people: values, beliefs, identities, and the desire to make better choices. But human behavior is rarely driven by a single motivation. People can care about sustainability and still choose price, status, convenience, or belonging when those motivations collide. This foundational conversation will unpack how those competing forces actually shape behavior and why understanding which one wins, when and why, matters for anyone trying to drive adoption.
Culture as Currency: Why Sustainability Can’t Scale on Morals Alone
Alongside systems transformation and business innovation, making sustainability relevant to what people value and desire can accelerate participation and commercial results. In this keynote, we’ll explore why embedding sustainability into the cultural conversation is a critical, but often overlooked, factor for driving change. We’ll examine how leading brands use culture to shape what people want and buy, why integrating sustainability into these cultural drivers is essential for impact at scale, and what’s lost when sustainability and brand-building operate on separate tracks.
Designing for Demand: Why Better Solutions Don’t Sell Themselves
Understanding human behavior is one thing. Applying that insight to the design of products, programs, and systems people actually adopt is another. Experts in consumer psychology, research, and brand strategy will examine where adoption is won or lost before launch, what businesses need to understand before investing in the next solution, and how behavioral insight can inform the decisions that ultimately shape participation and commercial traction.
How Resale Broke the Rules: Why Consumers Embraced a More Complicated Way to Shop
Consumers typically prefer easy, fast, convenient experiences, yet resale often means more searching, unpredictable inventory, and friction. Still, secondhand has shifted from hidden necessity to mainstream behavior, becoming a significant part of the fashion economy. Price is part of the appeal, but the desire to save money isn’t new, and buying used wasn’t always something people wanted to talk about. So what changed? This conversation examines what made secondhand valuable enough for millions to change their habits, what outweighed the friction, and what resale’s rise can teach businesses looking to build participation around other sustainable products, services, and models.
Day 2
Making Sustainability Stick When Priorities Shift
What Actually Changes a Purchase Decision?
Brands have heavily invested in sustainability claims, certifications, badges, traceability tools, and now Digital Product Passports. But more information doesn’t always mean more influence. At the moment of purchase, sustainability must compete with price, convenience, design, habit, and the way choices are presented. Drawing on consumer research, marketplace experimentation, and emerging digital experiences, this panel will investigate which signals influence decisions, which create friction, and how purchase environments can be designed to support sustainable choices.
When Good Intentions Backfire: How Accountability Can Create New Barriers to Adoption
As pressure grows for stronger guardrails around sustainability claims, new rules, labels, and policies are reshaping how brands communicate with consumers. But introducing an accountability mechanism doesn’t guarantee the behavioral outcome it was designed to produce. This conversation brings together experts in sustainability claims, policy, certification, and communications to examine what happens when new guardrails meet real consumers, legal teams, and commercial decisions. Where does accountability strengthen trust and adoption, where can unintended friction emerge, and how do we build systems that protect consumers while still producing the progress we need?
Turning Consumer Insight into Business Leverage
When sustainability budgets, teams, and commitments are under pressure, proving that consumers care is only the first step. The real challenge is translating that insight into participation, loyalty, revenue, risk reduction, brand value, or other outcomes that drive business decisions. This conversation will examine how sustainability teams can turn consumer insight into organizational action, securing the attention, budget, and cross-functional support needed to move from opportunity to impact. We’ll explore where promising arguments lose momentum, what makes sustainability harder to deprioritize during business shifts, and how to position sustainability as a strategic priority, not just a cost.
The Adoption Playbook: Turning Sustainability Into Participation, Demand, and Business Results
After two days exploring the behavioral, cultural, commercial, and systems-level forces that shape sustainability, this closing session will translate those insights into practical business action. The session will identify both immediate opportunities and longer-term strategic shifts to help turn sustainability from a well-intentioned initiative into something people participate in, businesses can scale, and leadership can champion. This session will also introduce the forthcoming SFF26 Intelligence Report, providing a deeper resource for translating these insights into sustained action within your organization.
FULL SCHEDULE TO BE ANNOUNCED
*Session titles and program details are subject to change.
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