Our sustainability journey started over half a century ago, in 1965, when we introduced Sisal manufacturing by our parent company NC John and Sons. Our further search for recycled materials led us to diversify into garments, and this journey took us towards natural materials such as organic cotton, bamboo, and sustainable rPET. Recently, we officially launched NC John Garments, a wholly-owned subsidiary of NC John & Sons.
While traversing this journey, we have launched India’s first sustainable corporate wear brand, Unmoda Corporate Wear.
At NC John, we have worked with many well-known brands globally. Our focus has been on building trust and confidence by pursuing transparency and setting standards. We have pursued certifications such as GOTS, BCI, WRAP, and Fair Trade and have maintained these as this is important for demonstrating our commitment.
However, while doing everything sustainable, we lacked a structured approach to sustainability. Also, we wanted to ensure that we are focused ahead and can deal with futuristic challenges such as climate change. Some of the frameworks we explored were SASB, GRI, etc., and we decided on GRI (Global Reporting Initiative) as this was one of the most comprehensive frameworks. Our sustainability partners, Sage Sustainability, supported us in analyzing data and collaborated on materiality analysis. Materiality was fascinating as it helped us shortlist the critical focus areas for us and our stakeholders.
Deep dive into the data uncovered our strengths and weaknesses and we had an excellent opportunity as a team to work on the insights and targets. For example, we decided to get rooftop solar, change fuel source, work further on perfecting recyclability and finally pursue certification for carbon neutrality as we realized we were nearly there.
The Sustainability Report was an inspiring journey for our team as we are proud of our wage indicators, sustainable raw materials, the pursuit of diversity and working with local suppliers. One of the crucial things we realized was that the refrigerants used are highly potent greenhouse gases and we need to substitute those with better ones.
All these efforts have significantly helped us set our long-term sustainability goals of optimizing energy usage, reducing virgin resources and contributing toward a sustainably and ethically just world. Feel free to send us your comments and feedback on our journey.