More Than Measurement: Environmental Assessments Lead to Progress You Can Prove

New analysis of Fashion Revolution’s 2024 and its newly-released 2025 Fashion Transparency Index shows that brands using Worldly aren’t just reporting more data; they’re consistently outperforming peers and showing stronger progress on supply chain carbon reduction and resilience. 

Article key points: 

• Worldly customers significantly outperform non-customers in both the 2024 and 2025 Fashion Transparency Indices, with higher average and median scores.
• Brands using Worldly make up a majority of top transparency performers, signaling stronger supply chain visibility and governance.
• Higher transparency scores correlate with better readiness for Scope 3 emissions reduction, supplier engagement, and regulatory compliance.

Why supply chain transparency is a leading indicator of climate readiness

In an era of rising climate risk, supply chain disruption, and regulatory scrutiny, supply chain transparency has become a leading indicator of an organization’s preparedness and resilience. 

From curbing emissions, to complying with regulations, meeting consumer demands, and reducing supply chain disruption and risk, accountability and transparency are key to taking meaningful action across the consumer goods value chain to establish a responsible business. 

This is because reducing emissions, especially Scope 3, requires far more than annual reporting cycles. It depends on ongoing supplier participation, data quality, benchmarking, and the ability to identify hotspots for products and  facilities where taking action will matter most.

A company’s performance in indices such as the Fashion Transparency Index reflects whether those building blocks are in place. Brands that consistently score higher on transparency benchmarks are often the same brands that are better prepared to:

• Identify emissions hotspots
• Engage suppliers at scale
• Support regulatory compliance
• Make informed sourcing and investment decisions
• Build more resilient supply chains over time 

While transparency alone isn’t the goal, it’s the signpost pointing to which companies are committed to being more responsible. 

The Fashion Transparency Index (FTI) and why it matters

Fashion Revolution’s Fashion Transparency Index is one of the most widely referenced benchmarks in the apparel industry. It evaluates how much brands disclose about their policies, practices, and impacts across areas like governance, supply chain traceability, purchasing practices, and environmental and social performance.

While transparency scores don’t measure emissions reductions directly, they do reveal something critical: whether a brand has the systems, data, and supplier engagement in place to understand its impacts and act on them.

That’s why transparency performance increasingly matters — not just to advocacy groups, but to regulators, investors, customers, and supply chain partners who see disclosure quality as a proxy for operational maturity and responsible business.

Worldly customers significantly over-perform in both the 2024 and 2025 FTI

When it comes to supply chain transparency in the apparel industry, Worldly customers are some of the top performers, demonstrating how a focus on primary data and supplier engagement translates into real-world benefits. 

This finding makes the case for brands and retailers looking to back up their supply chain transparency efforts with concrete results. Similarly, this new analysis may help sustainability and responsible sourcing teams trying to get their own companies to invest in a solution like Worldly on board.    

How we analyzed the data

To understand how Worldly customers compare to non-customers, we analyzed Fashion Revolution’s 2024 Fashion Transparency Index “Final Score” dataset, covering 250 brands and the 2025 edition, covering 200 brands.

We then compared transparency performance between:

2024

• Worldly customers: 100 brands (40% of the dataset)
• Non-customers: 150 brands (60% of the dataset)

2025

• Worldly customers: 82 brands (41% of the dataset)
• Non-customers: 118 brands (59% of the dataset)

This apples-to-apples comparison focuses on outcomes and highlights how brands are performing relative to one another within the same benchmark.

Three findings that stand out from the past two years’ FTIs

1. Worldly customers consistently make up the majority of top performers

Despite representing just 40 to 41 percent of all brands assessed, Worldly customers account for 56% of the top quartile (top 25 percent) of the Index in 2024 and 50% of the top ten percent of performers in 2025.

In other words: Worldly customers represent the majority among transparency leaders, signaling stronger disclosure practices across governance, supply chain visibility, and impact reporting.

2. Worldly customers outperform on score—by a wide margin

In 2024, Worldly customers scored an average of 23.2, compared to 14.85 for non-customers. That’s a 56 percent higher average score, or an 8.4-point gap, between brands using Worldly and those that don’t.

That performance gap held in 2025. Worldly customers scored nearly 60 percent higher on average than non-customers (18.0 vs. 11.2), reinforcing that the difference isn’t driven by a handful of high performers, but by consistently stronger results across the customer base.

Even at the median—a better reflection of the “typical” brand—the advantage remains clear in both years. In 2024, the median Worldly customer scored 22.5 compared to 12 for non-customers. In 2025, the median customer score was 15, versus 8.5 for non-customers.

At the midpoint of the dataset in both years, Worldly customers score nearly twice as high.

3. Worldly customers lead the highest tier of transparency performance

In 2024, Worldly customers dominated the Index’s highest tier: among brands scoring 50 or higher, 73 percent were Worldly customers (8 of 11 brands).

While 2025 scores were more widely distributed, Worldly customers continued to stand out at the top of the rankings. They represented half of the top 10 percent of performers overall and were nearly twice as likely as non-customers to rank in the top quartile—demonstrating not just peak performance, but sustained leadership across the upper end of the Index.

Together, these results suggest that Worldly customers aren’t just incremental improvers. Year over year, they are more likely to reach—and remain among—the industry’s transparency leaders.

What these results suggest

These findings don’t prove causation. But the pattern is consistent and telling.

Worldly customers don’t just disclose more information: They have built the operational foundation required for credible transparency and future decarbonization, including:

• Consistent supplier engagement that enables primary, facility-level data collection
• Stronger traceability and data readiness across complex global supply chains
• More credible governance and disclosures backed by standardized methodologies
• The ability to move from measurement to action, rather than stopping at reporting and compliance

This aligns with a broader reality facing the industry: You can’t improve what you can’t see, and you can’t act on data you don’t trust.

From measurement to progress

Supply chain data in and of itself is not a magic bullet. Data becomes a valuable business tool when it’s clear, accurate, and actionable. With the right solutions in place, brands, retailers, and manufacturers can gain a never-before-seen view of their supply chain to uncover hidden risks and make decisions that support their climate and other business goals. 

This analysis of Worldly customers’ performance on the 2024 and 2025 FTI reinforces what we see across our customer community every day: When brands invest in consistent, high-quality supply chain data and supplier engagement, transparency improves—and so does real progress.

Learn more about Worldly’s solutions that help brands, retailers, and manufacturers measure and report on their supply chain performance, while providing valuable and actionable insights, supplier engagement tools, and much more.