Oct 28 – 30, 2026 · Hyatt Regency Portland
Program Preview
Opening Night
Welcome & Networking
Grab a drink, break the ice, and kick off SFF26 by meeting the people you’ll be spending the next two days with. It’s your chance to find your people and head into Day 1 with conversations and connections already underway.
Day 1
Understanding Human Behavior & Consumer Demand
Why Good Intentions Don’t Lead to Action
Sustainability strategies often begin with a familiar set of ideas: consumers are guided by their values, express themselves through their choices, and want to belong to something meaningful. But knowing that values, identity, and belonging influence behavior isn’t the same as understanding how they operate—or predicting what someone will do when different motivations collide. This foundational conversation will challenge the assumptions sustainability leaders make about human nature and examine why the same behavioral forces expected to accelerate adoption can produce very different outcomes. For anyone designing products, programs, or strategies around what consumers say they care about, the distinction is consequential.
Why Sustainability Struggles for Cultural Relevance
Fashion companies know how to create desire, shape taste, and place themselves at the center of culture. Yet those same capabilities rarely extend to their sustainability efforts. Even within companies that command enormous cultural relevance, sustainable products and initiatives often remain peripheral to the stories, conversations, and sources of value that make the brand matter to consumers. This keynote will examine why sustainability remains culturally invisible inside organizations that otherwise understand how demand is created, what’s lost when sustainability and brand-building operate on separate tracks, and whether the industry can achieve widespread adoption without first making sustainability relevant to the culture people actually participate in.
Designing for Consumer Demand
Companies can spend years developing a sustainable product, take-back program, resale model, or traceability tool only to discover that people don’t see enough value to change what they already do. By then, the decisions shaping adoption may already be embedded in the offering, customer experience, operations, and business model. Bringing together consumer psychology, research, and brand-side strategy, this conversation will examine where demand is won or lost before launch and what sustainability leaders need to understand to influence the decisions that determine whether an initiative gains participation, creates commercial value, or becomes another promising investment the business struggles to justify.
How Resale Broke the Rules: Why Consumers Embraced a More Complicated Way to Shop
Sustainability leaders are repeatedly told that adoption depends on making better choices easier, faster, and more convenient. Resale complicates that assumption. Shopping secondhand can require more searching, less predictable inventory, uncertain sizing, and an experience that still frustrates consumers yet it has moved from hidden necessity to public expression and become one of fashion’s fastest-growing behaviors. This conversation will examine what became powerful enough to outweigh the friction, how secondhand entered the cultural zeitgeist, and what its rise says about the rules sustainable products and business models may not need to follow to break into the mainstream.
Why Garment Worker Stories Struggle to Connect
Consumers are fascinated by content showing couture gowns being sketched, draped, sewn, and fitted, yet the people making most of their clothes rarely command the same attention. When garment workers are made visible, it’s often through narratives of exploitation and crisis that may generate sympathy without creating lasting connection. This conversation will examine why these stories struggle to resonate, how emotional and psychological distance shapes audience response, and what brands and advocates must understand to communicate workers’ skill, humanity, and lived experience without romanticizing their labor or minimizing the conditions that need to change.
Day 2
Applying the Science of Adoption
What Actually Drives Consumer Decisions
Consumers are encountering more sustainability information than ever through claims, certifications, marketplace badges, traceability tools, and emerging Digital Product Passports. But making more information available does not guarantee that people will notice it, trust it, understand it, or use it. Drawing on consumer research, marketplace experimentation, and emerging digital experiences, this conversation will examine what happens when sustainability information meets a real purchasing decision—and what brands, retailers, and platforms need to understand before adding another signal to an already crowded customer journey.
Are Greenwashing Rules Making Sustainability Harder to Choose?
The pressure to eliminate misleading environmental claims is changing what companies can say, what they are willing to say, and how easily consumers can identify more sustainable options. Stronger accountability may build trust, but legal uncertainty, complex substantiation requirements, and fear of public scrutiny may also push credible sustainability information altogether. Through real examples of labels and claims being introduced, reconsidered, and redesigned, this conversation will examine whether the systems created to protect consumers are also creating new barriers to discovery and adoption—and what responsible communication must accomplish now.
Why Good Regulation Doesn’t Always Change Behavior
A policy can be ambitious, carefully designed, and widely supported without producing the response its authors intended. Consumers and businesses do not encounter regulation on paper; they respond to how it changes costs, incentives, choices, risks, and everyday decisions—sometimes in unexpected ways. This conversation will examine the gap between regulatory intent and real-world behavior, why accountability mechanisms can produce unintended consequences, and what policymakers and industry leaders must understand if new rules are going to create meaningful change rather than technical compliance alone.
How Consumer Insight Becomes Internal Leverage
Consumer evidence may be one of the most powerful tools sustainability leaders have to move their work from a specialist priority to a business priority—but only if that evidence can influence decisions beyond the sustainability function. This conversation will examine what happens between identifying a consumer insight and securing the leadership attention, budget, resources, and cross-functional support required to act on it. For professionals navigating competing priorities inside complex organizations, the session will explore how sustainability earns internal momentum, where promising arguments lose power, and what it takes to make consumer adoption matter to the people deciding what the business will support next.
The Adoption Playbook: How to Turn Sustainability Into Participation, Demand, and Business Results
After two days examining human behavior, cultural relevance, consumer decision-making, communication, regulation, and internal influence, one question remains: What should organizations do differently now? This closing conversation will connect the forces that determine whether sustainability gains traction or stalls, helping attendees identify where adoption is being lost and which questions need to enter strategy earlier. It will translate the conference’s central insights into a practical framework for building participation, demonstrating business value, and strengthening the case for continued investment as organizations make their next generation of decisions.
Full schedule to be announced
*Session titles and program details are subject to change.
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