Few leaders in the apparel and textiles industry bring as much end-to-end experience as Helena Helmersson. Having worked across buying, production and corporate social responsibility during her nearly three decades at H&M Group, she later became the only fashion executive to move from CSO to CEO, giving her a unique vantage point on how sustainability and commercial strategy intersect at scale.
In a recent discussion with Tanya Richard, COO and head of stakeholder engagement and sustainability communications at Innovation Forum, Helmersson reflected on what it truly takes to drive structural change inside large organizations. Her central message: sustainability must be built into the core of the business, not treated as an add-on.
“Integrating and embedding sustainability in the business won’t just happen,” she said. “You have to design the operating model to make it integrated.”
This philosophy shaped her leadership at H&M, where she built on sustainability efforts dating back to the 1990s. During her tenure, the company expanded supply chain transparency, scaled textile collection and recycling programs, and introduced initiatives such as the H&M Conscious range—underscoring that sustainable fashion can be accessible to all. She also served as co-chair of The Fashion Pact, highlighting her commitment to industry-wide collaboration.
For sustainability to be effective, she said, it must be embedded into governance structures, accountability frameworks and day-to-day decisionmaking. Actionability and accountability are key. “[When you] look into the organizational structures, who should be accountable for reaching those sustainability targets? An operating model where business leaders are accountable for circularity or carbon targets is really, really important.”
This requires clarity on who owns sustainability targets, how they are tracked and how frequently progress is reviewed as per priorities. “Certain KPIs are treated as something you follow up on every week, while others you might follow up on every half year,” she said.
Incentives are another critical lever. Helmersson argued that sustainability should be treated like any other business objective, integrated into performance metrics and compensation. “I really don’t think that the incentive part is rocket science, but it demands that you have alignment on the governance. And of course the CEO. You need to be aligned with the board.”
However, when aligning boards and executive teams, short-term profitability and long-term resilience are often at odds. Helmersson encourages leaders to deal with such conflicts of profitability and sustainability, and not to shy away from them.
She also pointed out how sustainability trade-offs are unfairly pushed down to the employees making sourcing decisions if systems aren’t adjusted. “If you have several hundreds of buyers, and they are supposed to choose whether to go for virgin material or circular material, you leave it up to them to decide whether to go for profitability or sustainability,” which leads to friction and inconsistency. Her solution is to centralize key decisions and absorb costs at the top, although she has regrets about not doing this more.
“I wish I had [made the decision to absorb the costs] so that all these buyers didn’t see that premium cost and could see cost parity between virgin and more sustainable materials,” she said. Today, this idea of making systems “simple for the many and complex for the few” is a recurring leadership philosophy to accelerate sustainable practices.
Helmersson also underscored the importance of system thinking, a capability she developed during her time as CSO. “How do you connect the dots? How do you pull different levers to move a whole system?” she said. This mindset proved invaluable as CEO, enabling her to align strategy, culture and operations to drive meaningful change.
Supply chain collaboration is also critical. Drawing on her experience working closely with suppliers in Bangladesh, China, Europe and elsewhere, she emphasized the value of long-term partnerships. “Consolidating volumes, having fewer partners, but also planning volumes over a few years… is such a win-win,” she said. These relationships not only improve sustainability outcomes but also enhance quality, planning, pricing and flexibility.
Changing Attitudes, Changing Actions
Achieving transparency across complex global supply chains remains a challenge, especially among fragmented value chains, but she cautions against frustration hampering action.
“I know this from having a dialogue with many leaders, that when looking at your value chain, you can get totally overwhelmed; like the industry is simply too complex for us to be able to change it,” she said.
She advises companies to think “step by step, integrating data traceability and working more with strategic partnerships” as an enabler.
Reflecting on how the sustainability conversation has evolved, she described a shift from the “peak of inflated expectations” around 2020—when bold commitments were widespread—to a period of disillusionment marked by missed targets and increased scrutiny. Today, she believes the industry is entering a more mature phase: “the slope of enlightenment… where you actually collaborate, go deep and create value.”
This evolution is also reshaping organizational structures. Rather than maintaining large, standalone sustainability teams, companies are increasingly embedding expertise into core business and innovation roles. While some may interpret this as a weakening of ambition, Helmersson sees it as a necessary step toward integration.
Since stepping down as CEO of H&M in January 2024, she has continued to influence the industry through board roles at Mango, Quizrr and On, and as chair of Circulose. From this vantage point, she sees the need to engage customers through value (price, convenience and desirability), and to “go deep” in priority areas rather than spreading efforts too thin.
Looking ahead, she sees innovation as a critical enabler. Advances in sustainable materials are promising, “but the most difficult part is the scaling, and that’s why we see so few in commercial scale. And that’s where Circulose is really standing out. We have 11 brands that signed up with Circulose, and we’re going to move the needle.”
