Sustainability is ‘Business as Usual’ at Dunelm: How The UK’s Top Homeware Brand Engages Suppliers

By: Lisa Ly, Senior Sustainability Manager, Dunelm

Like many consumer brands, British home furnishings retailer, Dunelm, faces a critical challenge in today’s world: We must provide quality, high-value products to our customers while ensuring we meet self-imposed, consumer-driven, and regulatory requirements for sustainability practices throughout our operations.

This is why Dunelm decided to work with Worldly, an industry-leading solutions provider with software that enables facilities to complete the Higg Facility Environment Module (FEM), developed by Cascale. With Worldly’s platform, we can work with our suppliers to measure each facility’s baseline environmental impact, identify hotspots, track progress, and ultimately achieve our common goals to improve. 

Getting this level of engagement and buy-in might seem challenging, particularly for brands just starting to broach the topic of sustainability with their suppliers—but it’s entirely possible! In Dunelm’s first year introducing the Higg FEM to our Tier One facilities, we achieved an 84.7 percent completion rate for Tier One facilities, with 86.6 percent of key Tier Ones validating their data. 

With 2030 just around the corner, brands and suppliers that want to be ahead of regulatory and industry trends and standards have no time to waste. Here are the ways we at Dunelm have successfully engaged our suppliers and set ourselves on track to reach our goal of even stronger facility engagement in the near future. 

Transparency with suppliers is key 

If I had to choose the most important point to share with sustainability teams at other brands, regardless of the industry, it would be to prioritize transparent communication with your suppliers. We all should be working with united goals in mind. Not just Dunelm’s goals, or another brand’s goals, but goals set across the entire industry or by your country or region. We should all be working towards similar targets, which means your suppliers are getting consistent requirements from multiple brand customers. Still, you need to have honest conversations with your suppliers about why these goals are critical to meet.    

Right now, we’re focused on getting as clear a picture of our environmental baseline, and we’re well on the way. Being really transparent with our suppliers about why we want them to take that first step and complete their environmental assessments and validate their data was a huge part of our initial success. The focus on transparency won’t stop there, though. We expect to collaborate with our suppliers on setting carbon and water reduction goals that are ambitious, but realistic. Transparency about approaches and progress is critical to any brand’s success in supply chain decarbonization and sustainability efforts.  

Establish ongoing communications 

Clear communication with supply chain partners is vital to reaching sustainability goals, and it can’t be a one-time thing. The conversation between brands and their suppliers must be continuous and two-way. At Dunelm, we had great success even in our first year of requesting our suppliers complete their Higg FEM by: 

• Starting the conversation at least six months ahead of the completion deadline
• Kicking off our efforts with an initial educational webinar covering goals, requirements, and timelines, and following up with one-on-one sessions with each key supplier to go deeper into their specific situation
• Providing suppliers with a clear roadmap for what they should be doing, when, and what the next step will be
• Sending regularly scheduled reminder emails, as often as biweekly, and becoming more targeted as the deadline approaches
• Encouraging suppliers to respond back with status updates and any roadblocks they’re having so we can assist before it becomes a last-minute problem

It’s also important to remember key points about communicating with suppliers such as to provide communications in their own language and to offer different formats (email, video, live or interactive, etc.) to accommodate different communication styles and preferences. 

Get your commercial teams involved 

We found that involving our commercial teams in sustainability conversations with suppliers was key to our success. It helped our supplier partners understand that sustainability is central to our business strategy and a key part of working with Dunelm

Internally, we also kept our commercial team updated on each supplier’s progress on Higg FEM assessments so they could support completion of the questionnaire. These updates became more frequent as the deadline to complete the FEM approached, and I believe we were more successful thanks to our commercial team being involved in communicating with the suppliers than had we (the sustainability team) been chasing after FEM statuses on our own. 

Take advantage of Worldly for support and assistance 

I don’t know if everyone knows this, but Worldly is very keen to help out, to experiment, to share what’s worked with others, and to help you implement what works specifically for you and your suppliers. Worldly has worked with tends of thousands of suppliers around the world, and can assist you in the development of communication and tactics to engage your own suppliers. You definitely need to take advantage of having that type of partnership! It’s not always the case with some of the initiatives we have, so we’re very lucky to be working with Worldly, who do want to test and trial things with us because we’re also very interested to see what works and improve over time. 

Then, there’s the Worldly Adoption Tool. This enables each brand to scale and track supplier engagement and progress, and using it has been a major factor in our success. At Dunelm, we’ve specifically invested in the upgraded level of support that enables the Worldly team to do much of the heavy lifting for us by tracking supplier engagement and how they’re progressing as they complete the assessments. Even if you’d rather do the legwork yourself, don’t forget that every Worldly customer gets access to the Adoption Tool, which provides a lot of resources to get facilities engaged.  

Make sustainability measurement part of “business as usual” 

When you take the steps I’ve mentioned above, the brand-supplier relationship becomes rooted in conversations and action around sustainability that are just part of business as usual. This is a key point in driving real change over time, and I can already point to the results of this strategy with our suppliers at Dunelm. 

The ultimate goal is to make sustainability part of the way we do business, rather than an additional burden or something seen as an optional bonus. This involves viewing it as part of Dunelm’s core business practices and having partnership with each internal team and our suppliers.

About the author

Lisa is an experienced professional in sustainability strategy development and management, specialising in the fashion, footwear, and home furnishings sectors on a global scale. She has a background in product development, lower environmental impact supply chain development, circularity, and data reporting. Her expertise lies in crafting and executing impactful sustainability strategies that drive real action and change in the industry by taking a multi-stakeholder and collaborative approach to strategy development, working closely with diverse teams and partners to create solutions that are both innovative and sustainable.

About Dunelm 

Dunelm is the UK’s leading homewares retailer. It has a specialist offer of homewares and furniture for all tastes and budgets, across its stores and online.

Want to get started on your sustainability journey today? Contact Worldly