Can Mustan Lalani make SHEIN Sustainable?

Thanks to its global fast fashion model, SHEIN has not exactly made itself a favourite of sustainability campaigners.

However, recently appointed Global Head of Sustainability Mustan Lalani is hoping to change that.

We spoke with him at Sustainability LIVE Chicago about what he's going to do differently.

Please introduce yourself and tell us about your role

I'm Mustan and I oversee sustainability at SHEIN. For those who don't know, SHEIN is the on-demand fashion and retail platform that's offering clothes and retail products to customers all over the world.

We have a vision to make fashion accessible to all, and I've been in this role now since January, so I'm just getting up to my six-month term.

So you're getting used to the job? You've just been on stage for a fireside chat about the circular economy. I wonder if you could summarise a couple of key points?

Yeah, happy to do that. We had a good discussion. We brought one of our technology platforms, Aloqia, to help us do this session today, and the topic was about circularity and how technology helps to enable more full-scale circularity in our products and garments.

The big discussion that we had and the outcome we wanted to show was that we are using and buying a certain amount of dead stock fabrics or excess inventory of fabrics and materials and integrating that into our new garments and products.

And from 2023 to 2024, we actually increased the use of these materials, which would normally end up in landfills or even worse be burned. And we increased them by 40%. It was 23,000 metres of fabric used in 2024.

This is a relatively unusual event in that we bring together people from three different sectors: procurement, supply chain and sustainability. What do you think the benefits of this might be?

Oh, just kudos to the Sustainability LIVE team for bringing us together. I think it's really important that we start to think about sustainability not on its own in a silo, but try to integrate and embed it into supply chains, into procurement, for example. I think that it's really great that you were able to convene such a group together.

What are your key takeaways from the event?

I was walking around the exhibition area and I saw many of the service providers and it was so integrated. So many of the traditional supply chain stakeholders or service providers were talking and they had lots of service offerings on sustainability.

And the traditional sustainability stakeholders had lots of service offerings on supply chain or procurement.

So I think one of my takeaways here is that, at least from what I'm seeing here in Chicago, it's so embedded and integrated and I think that that's a key lesson for me that I'm going to take back to SHEIN and see what we could do to even further embed the sustainability work we're doing into supply chain and into some of our logistics and procurement areas as well.

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