OCTOBER 29–30, 2026 · VIRTUAL
schedule
All times Pacific. Session times include the premiere and live speaker Q&A, where scheduled.
DAY 1
Understanding the Adoption Gap
Welcome & Kantar Strategic Insights Address: Where Systems Change Meets Behavior Change
Better materials, technologies, and systems are essential. But what happens when customers don’t choose them and leadership doesn’t see the value? SFF Founder Brittany Sierra opens SFF26 with the question guiding this year’s conference: what turns sustainability investment into adoption? Kantar’s Elizabeth Katsadouros follows with consumer and market insights on what’s at stake for customer demand, internal buy-in, and continued investment when better solutions fail to gain traction.
Consumer Voices
Hear directly from shoppers about what matters to them, what they trust, and what shapes their choices.
Behavioral Blind Spots: Why Good Intentions Don’t Lead to Action
Customers can care about sustainability and still choose price, status, convenience, or belonging when motivations collide. This conversation unpacks how those competing forces shape behavior, what sustainability strategies often overlook, and why understanding which motivation wins, when, and why matters for designing products, experiences, and messages people actually respond to.
Morning Break
Culture as Currency: Why Sustainability Can’t Scale on Morals Alone
How does sustainability become part of what people value and desire? Jasmine Bina explores how brands build cultural relevance around ideas customers don’t inherently seek out, why some propositions move from niche to mainstream while others stall, and what sustainability teams can learn about making better products and practices matter to customers for reasons beyond sustainability alone.
Designing for Demand: Why Better Solutions Don’t Sell Themselves
Understanding human behavior is one thing. Applying it before a product, program, or system reaches the market is another. Experts in consumer psychology, research, brand strategy, and product innovation examine where adoption is won or lost before launch, what businesses need to understand before investing in the next solution, and how customer insight can inform the decisions that shape participation and commercial traction.
Lunch Break
The Fashion ReModel: What New Research Reveals About Customer Clear-Outs
Defining the next era of growth for resale and remaking means businesses can use wardrobe clear-outs as an opportunity for growth. In this keynote, the Ellen MacArthur Foundation will share new insights from The Fashion ReModel that explore how customers clear out their wardrobes, and what it will take for brands and retailers to turn those behaviors into a reliable, scalable source of secondhand supply for resale and remaking.
Beyond the Take-Back: Inside Calvin Klein’s Approach to Customer Participation
Building a take-back program is one thing. Getting customers to participate is another. Debrand takes attendees inside Calvin Klein’s approach, examining what customers were told, how transparency was built into the experience, what early feedback revealed, and what changed as a result. A practical case study in how brands can design, communicate, test, and improve circular programs around actual customer participation.
Afternoon Break
Consumer Voices
Hear directly from shoppers about what matters to them, what they trust, and what shapes their choices.
How Resale Broke the Rules: Why Consumers Embraced a More Complicated Way to Shop
Consumers typically prefer easy, fast, convenient experiences, yet resale often requires more searching, unpredictable inventory, and added friction. Still, secondhand has shifted from hidden necessity to mainstream behavior and a significant part of the fashion economy. What changed? This conversation examines what made resale valuable enough for millions of people to change their habits, how platforms and culture reduced or outweighed the friction, and what its rise can teach businesses trying to build participation around other sustainable products, services, and models.
Afternoon Break
When Brand Love Isn’t Enough
What does brand admiration actually tell you about customer demand, and what doesn’t it? Drawing on her experience at Mara Hoffman, Dana Davis joins SFF Founder Brittany Sierra to examine why cultural relevance, community, and sustainability credibility don’t necessarily translate into commercial resilience. The conversation explores how customers perceive value, where visibility and goodwill fall short, and how pricing, financing, and growth expectations affect a brand’s ability to sustain its commitments.
Closing Remarks + Day Two Preview
DAY 2
Making Sustainability Stick When Priorities Shift
Inside the Decision: How Brands Put Behavioral Science to Work
How do leading organizations use consumer insight to change what they build, how they position it, and the experience they create? Becky Frayer shows how behavioral science can inform product design and innovation decisions, with a practical framework for assessing your own brand proposition, identifying assumptions about customer behavior, and determining what to test before investing further.
Consumer Voices
Hear directly from shoppers about what matters to them, what they trust, and what shapes their choices.
What Actually Changes a Purchase Decision?
A sustainability claim can be accurate and still have little influence on a purchase. How do you know whether your messaging helps customers choose or simply gives them more information? Drawing on consumer research, marketplace experimentation, and retail implementation, this panel examines how claims, badges, certifications, and the way choices are presented affect trust, clarity, and purchase behavior, and how businesses can test and measure what actually makes a difference.
Morning Break
Selling Sustainability Internally: How to Win Buy-In Across the Business
Sustainability initiatives rarely succeed on ambition alone. They compete for budget, resources, attention, and space within product and commercial priorities. This panel examines how practitioners translate sustainability into outcomes the rest of the business values, build the case for investment, and navigate teams with different incentives. Hear where initiatives stall, what evidence decision-makers need to see, and what it takes for sustainability to move from a specialist priority into product, merchandising, marketing, and business decisions.
Lunch Break
Consumer Voices
Hear directly from shoppers about what matters to them, what they trust, and what shapes their choices.
After EmpCo: What Can Fashion Actually Say About Sustainability?
The rules have changed. Now what? As new EU requirements restrict generic environmental claims, sustainability labels, and other familiar forms of sustainability marketing, fashion brands face a practical challenge: how do you communicate meaningful progress without overstating it, confusing customers, or saying nothing at all? This conversation moves beyond what the rules require to examine what happens next: how sustainability, legal, product, and marketing teams decide what to say, what evidence they need, how claims translate across consumer touchpoints, and what credible sustainability communication looks like in practice.
When Good Intentions Backfire: How Accountability Can Create New Barriers to Adoption
How do you protect consumers from misleading sustainability claims without making useful information harder to communicate? This panel brings together experts in claims, policy, certification, and communications to examine the unintended consequences of greater accountability: greenhushing, legal caution, information overload, and new barriers between credible sustainability work and the people it's meant to reach. Where do stronger guardrails improve trust, where can they create new friction, and what does it take to protect consumers without making meaningful progress invisible?
Afternoon Break
The Adoption Playbook: Turning Sustainability Into Participation, Demand, and Business Results
What should you do differently when you return to work? This closing conversation translates two days of SFF26 insights into decisions teams can act on: where consumer insight should influence product and strategy, what to test before investing further, how to strengthen participation and demand, and how to make the case internally for what works. The session will identify immediate opportunities and longer-term shifts attendees can apply within their own organizations and introduce the forthcoming SFF26 Intelligence Report as a deeper resource for putting the learning into practice.
Closing Remarks
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