H&M had spent two years building its sustainability program—the Conscious Collection, recycling initiatives, transparent supply chain reporting. The infrastructure was there. The commitment was real. But the numbers told a different story. Customers weren’t engaging. Recycling bins sat empty. Sustainability pages had some of the lowest engagement rates on the site. The brand was saying all the right things, but people weren’t listening.

I was brought in to figure out why.

I started with a simple assumption: maybe we were asking the wrong question. Instead of asking why people weren’t engaging with sustainability, I wanted to understand how they actually shopped. So I designed a three-week study that paired direct observation with depth interviews. I shadowed users while they browsed—both in-store and on the app—watching where they paused, what they skipped, what made them hesitate or commit. Then I sat down with them afterwards for proper conversations, asking them to walk me through their decisions in their own words.

What emerged wasn’t a lack of interest. It was a conflict the interface itself was creating.

In one session, a woman in her thirties scrolled past a Conscious Collection banner, clicked on a sweater, and immediately saw a countdown timer: “Only 2 left in your size!” She bought it, but afterwards she looked frustrated. “I wanted to read about the materials,” she said, “but I felt rushed. Like if I didn’t buy it now, I’d miss out.” The app was designed to create urgency, but urgency doesn’t pair well with thoughtful decision-making. You can’t ask someone to slow down and care while simultaneously shouting that time is running out.

I saw this pattern repeat across dozens of sessions. People genuinely wanted to make better choices—they’d click into sustainability sections, read about recycling programs, search for organic materials. But the interface kept sabotaging them. Prominent FOMO messaging. Limited stock warnings. Flash sale countdowns. The entire design language screamed buy now, buy fast, buy more. The sustainability content, by contrast, felt like homework tucked into a sidebar. It wasn’t that people didn’t care. It’s that caring required swimming upstream against every other signal the interface sent.

The breakthrough was realizing we didn’t need to educate people more—we needed to stop making it so hard for them to act on what they already believed.

I brought this insight back to the team and worked closely with our Content Lead to redesign the entire experience. We started by mapping every touchpoint where sustainability intersected with shopping behavior, then asked a simple question at each one: does this make it easier or harder to choose well?

The recycling program was the most glaring failure. It lived on a separate page with clinical, transactional copy: “Recycle your old clothes here. Get 15% off your next purchase.” It felt like a bribe wrapped in obligation. In a co-design workshop, a participant put it bluntly: “This looks like guilt in a box.” So we redesigned it as something softer, more human. We removed the guilt-driven framing and reintroduced it as a ritual: “Give your clothes a second life.” We embedded the Take Back program directly at checkout—not as an afterthought, but as a natural next step. After purchasing, customers saw a simple prompt: “Have something you no longer wear? Send it back to us—any brand, any condition—and we’ll turn it into something new.”

We added a short video showing the fiber journey. Not flashy, just honest. A voiceover explaining what happens: how garments are sorted, how fibers are separated, how they’re woven into new materials. We tested this in select stores first, embedding it at the point of transaction. People slowed down. They watched. They asked staff questions. It stopped being a container for old clothes and became a conversation.

For the app, we removed the contradiction between urgency and care. Countdown timers were dialed back. FOMO messaging was replaced with contextual information—”Made with organic cotton grown in Portugal using renewable energy” appeared where “Only 3 left!” used to be. We made repair guides easily accessible from product pages, reframing care as an extension of ownership rather than an inconvenience. The message shifted from buy responsibly—which sounds like scolding—to this is designed to last, and here’s how to keep it that way.

The hypothesis was simple: if we stopped asking people to resist the interface and instead designed the interface to support their intentions, behavior would shift. We didn’t need to convince anyone to care more. We needed to remove the friction between caring and doing.

The results came faster than expected. Take-back program participation increased thirty-four percent within the first quarter. More telling, it sustained—people kept coming back. NPS scores for sustainability jumped twenty-two points, and qualitative feedback shifted from vague approval to specific appreciation. “It finally feels integrated, not tacked on,” one user wrote. Another: “I didn’t realize how easy this could be.”

But the moment that stayed with me happened in a Gothenburg store. A teenager stood at the recycling bin, holding a worn denim jacket. She hesitated, then placed it in the slot. On the screen beside her, the video began—the same quiet voiceover, the same fiber journey. She watched all the way through. When it ended, she smiled, then turned and walked toward the exit. No staff prompt. No incentive dangled. Just a small, private decision made easier because the design respected it.

Some features scaled globally. Others were refined based on regional feedback. A few were archived when they didn’t perform. But the shift that mattered most wasn’t in any single feature—it was in how we thought about sustainability. Not as content to append, but as behavior to enable. Not as a message to broadcast, but as infrastructure to build.

Turns out when you stop lecturing people and just make it easy to do the right thing, they respond. Not because you convinced them. Because you stopped standing in their way.