Balancing Business and Sustainability: Finding Harmony with Nature in Manufacturing

By: Cecilia Chan, Chief Commercial Officer, Legend Swimwear Factory

Article key points: 

• Legend Swimwear Factory integrates sustainability as a core value from its founding, aiming to coexist with the local environment in Chencun, China, known for its water-dependent orchid industry.
• The company challenges the misconception that environmental responsibility and economic success are mutually exclusive, emphasizing that sustainable manufacturing practices are crucial for long-term business success.
• Transparency in the supply chain is vital for building trust and ensuring accountability. The industry still has a long way to go to share data transparently to enable meaningful action on environmental and social impacts throughout the entire value chain.
• Accountability for environmental and social impact, both locally and globally, is essential for addressing sustainability, requiring industry leaders to prioritize long-term environmental and social responsibility over short-term gains.

As Chief Commercial Officer at Legend Swimwear Factory, I’ve witnessed firsthand how sustainability can be integrated into manufacturing without sacrificing business success. Many believe that environmental responsibility and economic prosperity exist in opposition to each other. However, our experience proves that sustainable practices aren’t just ethical choices—they’re essential business strategies for long-term success. 

One vital piece of achieving long-term environmental and economic success is transparency, which is still often lacking in the supply chain, both between peers and between customer and vendor relationships. 

Our factory in Chencun, China has navigated these challenges and embraced sustainability, not as an add-on or afterthought, but as a core value since our founding. Maintaining these values will be essential for the next generation of leaders to successfully take on future sustainability challenges. 

The false dichotomy: Environment vs. economy

There’s often a view among businesses that the environment and economy are mutually exclusive. But there’s no economic prosperity on a dying planet. So, we have to move beyond viewing these two things as competing priorities and move to figuring out how to make them work together. 

At Legend Swimwear, we didn’t wake up one day and just decide sustainability was an important thing to do. Instead, the idea of operating sustainably was built into the culture of our company from our founders’ first days. 

Coexisting with nature: The Legend Swimwear story

So how do we coexist and find harmony between the environment and the economy? Legend Swimwear has had to grapple with this from day one because of where we’re located. Chencun is a town in the southern part of China that is known for being “The First Flower Town in China”, its Bonsai gardening expos, and with a 1,000-year flower history. Chencun has literally blossomed from its orchid industry, which generates over $30 million US dollars a year. 

Manufacturing swimwear is a water-intensive process and can lead to a great deal of pollutants in the water. But it would be impossible to operate our factory that way in Chencun where the local economy depends on clean water for the orchid industry and for the health of the local people.

So, very early on in our operations, we had to build a sustainable way of manufacturing to create a system where we’re living in harmony with nature and not competing with it.

Trust and transparency in the supply chain

Only in recent years has sustainability entered into the mainstream. And then “sustainability” kind of became a free-for-all marketing exercise, where we’ve seen some rather creative and questionable sustainability claims and campaigns. As a result, we often feel tension between trust and transparency around the topic of sustainability. It’s hard to trust someone that’s not transparent with you, and it’s hard to be transparent with somebody you don’t trust. And when the two scale back, we have little hope in advancing the sustainability agenda.

Legend Swimwear has a long history of making sustainability a priority in our own operations and within our upstream supply chain. Since 2017, we have conducted our annual Higg Facility Environmental Module (FEM) assessment. On Worldly, we can record verified environmental impact data and share it  with our brand partners, giving them insight into our environmental performance in a way they can trust. The Worldly platform is an enabler to bringing transparency and trust together for the fashion industry. 

The fashion industry is nearing the crossroads of sustainability, but it is not quite there yet. Right now regulations are not in place to hold brands accountable or require them to source from environmentally friendly factories or only from factories that are actually environmentally sustainable.

Hence, when thinking about a supplier scorecard and a decision whether to keep the supplier or not keep the supplier, or to place an order with supplier A or supplier B, it still comes back down to cost, quality, and speed. Is it fast? Is it good? Is it cheap? Those are the primary questions for most brands.

The added element of sustainability could be a competitive edge, but right now it’s still really not part of the decision-making process. So, if we are still mostly competing on cost and quality and lead time as a factory that’s not environmentally sustainable, then I have no incentive to disclose. Why would I want to be transparent if there was no need to do so?

Taking ownership of global impact

Ownership is a very important skill set for industry leaders and one I mention a lot. It’s similar to how we solve sustainability, or environmental impact. Environmental impact is a very local problem. It’s a local problem for manufacturers because if we pollute, we can’t continue to operate our business effectively. In our case, we simply couldn’t have our factory in Chencun if we polluted. 

If you look at how the world is waking up to sustainability, people are starting to realize that the world is round. That is, what we’re doing on one side of the planet is starting to have consequential impacts to everyone across the planet. We can’t afford to pass the buck anymore, whether that’s downstream to somebody else or to future generations.

If you refer to the United Nations’ definition of sustainability, it is “meeting the needs of the present without compromising the ability of our future generations to meet their needs.” It’s fixing it now and owning the problem, either owning it locally or owning it now, in the present. We need to do something now as a collective. The next generation of leaders or even the current leaders must not make it someone else’s problem, but have to really own it and fix it. Doing so is going to require us to forgo certain things that we want to hang on to, including a certain comfort level and a level of profitability. Simply put, something has to give. 

Leveling the playing field is something that transparency can do if we are all required to disclose our impacts. It’s also going to be vital to disclose the impact of our upstream partners because the environmental impact of a garment, for example, is the sum of its parts. In order to know what the environmental impacts of a garment is, we have to have traceability and transparency across all the players in the supply chain. If the requirement to be transparent is enforced, it levels the playing field and there’s more of an incentive to disclose. If you don’t, you’re out of the game. 

Transparency also helps the end consumer make a decision on how to buy something that benefits them and benefits the environment. Having that transparency helps with the decision-making process. The benefit of being transparent is that we have insightful data to make a fair comparison and to make informed decisions. Hopefully, through making informed decisions based on insightful data, everyone from brands to consumers would have a consequential net positive impact to the environment.

The path forward

At Legend Swimwear, our commitment to sustainability isn’t just a business decision; it’s the foundation upon which we’ve built our entire operation. The unique environmental challenges of operating in Chencun have transformed potential limitations into opportunities for innovation and responsible manufacturing. 

Looking forward, the path to a truly sustainable industry requires collective accountability, enforced transparency across the entire supply chain, and a willingness to prioritize long-term environmental responsibility over short-term gains. By embracing these values and encouraging others to do the same, we can create a manufacturing ecosystem where financial success and environmental stewardship aren’t competing interests but complementary strengths. 

The future of our industry, and in fact that of the entire planet, depends on our willingness to take ownership today of the challenges we face rather than passing them to someone else on the other side of the world, or hoping that tomorrow’s leaders will solve them for us.