Connecting quality, returns, stock and suppliers made the financial cost of environmental and social impacts visible.
Where this project comes from
This project began under European legislative pressure — in the run-up to the Omnibus package — but it soon stopped being a regulatory assignment and became a collective exercise in honesty. What started as an obligation stemming from the CSRD opened up an unusual space for dialogue: from the product and store teams through to the finance department, the company looked at itself without airbrushing. It accepted that growth also brings friction, contradictions, and decisions that don’t always keep pace with the market.
Double materiality was initially approached as a formality, but it ended up revealing itself as an exercise in deep listening: internal, through cross-departmental workshops, and external, bringing in suppliers, customers and sector players. Out of that emerged a more precise understanding of the real impacts — social, environmental and financial — running through the brand’s day-to-day activity. What started as regulatory compliance became a cross-functional exercise in listening and strategy.
What it changes, and why it matters
What’s truly transformative about the CSRD and ESRS framework isn’t the report — it’s the integration. For the first time, sustainability and financial thinking are analysed on the same plane. In this project, that integration was tangible: the finance department took on double materiality as another decision-making tool, not as a reputational add-on.
Clear examples emerged when linking cost pressure on suppliers to lower product quality, rising returns, and a direct hit to margins; or when connecting excess prototypes and unmanaged stock to operational inefficiencies, waste, and lost economic value. Sustainability stopped being abstract and became operational.
How we do it
Together with the Spora team, we designed a rigorous, participatory methodology aligned with the ESRS, able to translate social and environmental impacts into concrete financial risks and opportunities. The process combined technical analysis with active listening across teams, making it possible to connect variables that, until then, had been analysed separately within the organisation.
That work led to hybrid KPIs that cross economic indicators with real business impact factors: product quality and returns, supplier relationships and dependency, waste management and excess stock, staff turnover and training, as well as logistics and value-chain emissions.
With input from teams on both sides, these indicators were brought together into a double materiality matrix that made it possible to identify, prioritise and connect the company’s main impacts — putting structural challenges on the table, operational, cultural and financial, that up to that point had never been addressed together.
The matrix, and the double materiality exercise as a whole, didn’t stop at diagnosis: they fed directly into corporate strategy, into the sustainability strategy for the years ahead, and into the EINF (non-financial information statement), setting clear priorities and steering action towards management that’s more coherent, integrated and resilient. Double materiality moved from diagnosis into corporate strategy, the EINF and concrete action priorities.
Limits, lessons, and the future it sets in motion
“The more layers of the onion you peel, the more you cry.” This line from Patagonia’s Impact Report sums up precisely what this project involved. The deeper you dig into a company’s sustainability, the more obvious everything still left to do becomes. Far from being a failure, that recognition is the real starting point for any honest strategy.
When the Lola Casademunt double materiality exercise wrapped up, the question came immediately: how do we keep going? The answer didn’t arrive as grand declarations, but as a very specific gap. What was missing were operational indicators, defined by each department, able to give a recurring, shared reading of the situation — not once every three years, but continuously, built into day-to-day management.
That’s where the limits of this project became clear. Double materiality doesn’t, on its own, fix systemic inertia or remove structural dependencies. It doesn’t automatically transform culture or resolve long-standing tensions. But it does serve an essential function: it makes contradictions visible, orders priorities, and forces more responsible decisions.
This project rejects cosmetic sustainability. It accepts that communicating without transforming creates reputational risk; that squeezing costs without reviewing relationships ends up eroding quality; and that producing faster isn’t always producing better. Understanding these limits doesn’t weaken the strategy — it makes it stronger.
The future this sets in motion means consolidating that lesson. In 2026, the focus will be on designing a set of department-level KPIs that bring financial and impact indicators together into a single management system — a model that allows strategic decisions to be made from a shared, coherent, cross-functional view, able to strengthen the company’s resilience without giving up its purpose or the complexity of the context it operates in.
The next step is turning materiality into operational KPIs that every department can use on an ongoing basis.