H&M Group — 2024
H&M had built one of retail's most comprehensive
sustainability programmes.
Nobody was using it.
Not because they didn't care. Because the brand had designed a system that made caring impossible.
I was brought in after two years of investment had produced near-zero behavioural change. The Conscious Collection existed. The recycling infrastructure existed. The supply chain reporting existed. Engagement with all of it sat at the bottom of every analytics report. Recycling bins in flagship stores were, in practice, decorative.
My first decision was to stop asking why people weren't engaging with sustainability and instead understand how they actually shopped. That distinction matters. One question points at the customer. The other points at the system.
I designed a three-week study: direct observation paired with depth interviews, in-store and in-app. I watched where people paused, what they skipped, what made them commit or abandon. Then I sat with them and asked them to walk me through their own decisions.
What I found wasn't apathy. It was contradiction baked into the architecture.
One session defined the whole project. A woman in her thirties found a sweater in the Conscious Collection. She paused on it. She wanted to read about the materials. Then the app served her a countdown: Only 2 left in your size. She bought it. Afterwards, she looked frustrated. "I felt rushed," she said. "Like I couldn't stop to think."
The system was designed to manufacture urgency. Urgency is incompatible with considered decision-making. You cannot ask someone to care while every signal around them screams that there is no time to care. The sustainability content wasn't failing because customers were indifferent. It was failing because it had been placed inside a machine optimised to prevent the kind of thinking sustainability requires.
The problem was not a lack of education. It was a design that actively worked against the values it claimed to hold.
Taking that finding back to the team meant saying something uncomfortable: the interface itself was the obstacle. Not the message. Not the audience. The architecture.
We mapped every touchpoint where sustainability content intersected with purchasing behaviour and asked one question at each: does this design support the decision or undermine it?
The Take Back programme was the clearest failure. It lived on a standalone page with transactional copy — Recycle your old clothes here. Get 15% off your next purchase. In a co-design workshop, one participant read it and said: "This looks like guilt in a box." She was right. It was designed to feel like obligation, not agency.
We rebuilt it around a single reframe: not recycle your old clothes but give your clothes a second life. We embedded the programme at checkout — not as a prompt, not as an afterthought, but as a natural continuation of the purchase. We added a short film showing the fibre journey. No voiceover telling customers they had done something good. Just the process: sorting, separating, weaving. Honest and factual. In pilot stores, people stopped and watched. They asked staff questions. The bin stopped being infrastructure and became a moment.
For the app, I made a decision that required internal negotiation: we removed the urgency language from product pages where sustainability content appeared. Countdown timers came down. Only 3 left! was replaced with Made with organic cotton grown in Portugal using renewable energy. Repair guides were surfaced directly from product pages. The framing shifted — not buy responsibly, which sounds like a reprimand, but this is made to last, and here is how to keep it that way.
That required convincing people to give up conversion levers they trusted. It was the right call.
When you remove the friction between intention and action, you don't need to change what people believe. Behaviour follows.
We didn't need to convince anyone to care more. We needed to stop standing between their intentions and their actions.
Take-back programme participation rose 34% in the first quarter — up from a base of near-zero in participating stores. It didn't spike and drop; it compounded. NPS for sustainability jumped 22 points. Qualitative feedback shifted from vague positivity to specific recognition: It finally feels like part of the brand, not something bolted on.
The moment I think about most happened in Gothenburg, not in a dashboard. A teenager at a recycling point, holding a worn denim jacket. She hesitated. Then she placed it in the slot. The film started. She watched all the way through, alone, without prompting. When it ended, she turned and left.
No staff member had intervened. No incentive had been offered. She had simply been given a design that respected the decision she had already made.
Some of what we built scaled globally. Some was refined. Some was retired. But what changed permanently was not a feature set — it was a design principle. Sustainability is not content. It is not messaging. It is infrastructure. You build it into the decision, not around it.
Stop standing in the way of what people already want to do. That is the entire intervention.