Guest Spotlight: Joleen Ong, Senior Director of Brand and Retailer Membership at Cascale

By Ilse Heine

The Article One team recently had the pleasure of hearing from Joleen Ong, Senior Director of Brand and Retailer Membership at Cascale, as part of our guest speaker series. Joleen shared her perspectives on responsible sourcing and human rights in today’s global context.

Joleen brings extensive experience spanning both the private and non-profit sectors. Before joining Cascale, she was a Cascale member through Columbia Sportswear and Fanatics, where she led sustainability and social responsibility efforts across the organizations. Earlier in her career, she worked with Social Accountability International (SAI), where she built its communication program and co-founded the Global Living Wage Coalition. Throughout her professional journey, Joleen has focused on advancing diverse theories of change in supply chains, human rights, and labor practices.

Joleen shared practical insights on how purchasing practices can put pressure on manufacturers and influence working conditions, why sustainability teams need closer partnership with sourcing and leadership to drive implementation, how MSIs can translate data into real improvements, and how emerging frameworks are strengthening the business case for human rights and labor investments.

Cascale’s Mission – Strengths and Opportunities

Cascale (formerly the Sustainable Apparel Coalition) stands for “collective action at scale.” The organization’s recent name change reflects its expanded mission and increasingly diverse membership, extending beyond apparel and footwear. Today, Cascale brings together more than 300 retailers, brands, manufacturers, governments, academics, and NGOs across 33 countries, united by a vision of building a global consumer goods industry that gives more than it takes–from both people and the planet.

Joleen emphasized that one of Cascale’s unique strengths lies in its diverse member base–including manufacturers alongside brands, retailers, and NGOs–which creates opportunities to bring manufacturer perspectives into sustainability initiatives, a viewpoint often missing from traditional sustainability programs.

She also noted that a key differentiator for Cascale is that its tools, such as the Higg Index, are developed by the industry, for the industry. This collaborative approach fosters immediate buy-in from brands and manufacturers, rather than imposing standards externally.

Cascale is also evolving in response to emerging human rights due diligence (HRDD) regulations. In partnership with the Policy Hub, Cascale has aligned its tools to better reflect compliance requirements and mapped Higg Brand and Retail Module (Higg BRM) questions to CSRD regulations, ensuring that its frameworks continue to adapt alongside the regulatory landscape.

Purchasing Practices and Implementation Challenges

Cascale recently acquired Better Buying to support its mission of prioritizing systemic change in ‘purchasing practices.’ Indeed, Joleen reflected on her onsite factory audits in previous work, where she observed that factories with some of the poorest working conditions were not because management wanted to exploit their workers, but because of the commercial pressure the manufacturers felt from their customers.

When it comes to implementation, Joleen noted that while sustainability teams typically lead these initiatives, they often lack full visibility to internal sourcing and supply chain systems (such as PDM or PLM) and the authority to implement solutions–which makes it hard to prescribe solutions or follow up with an internal performance improvement plan. For this reason, effective implementation requires partnership with internal commercial partners and transformation teams handling software updates, cross-functional initiatives, and support from C-suite executives (particularly the COO) to ensure adoption across departments.

Effective Use of Standards and MSIs

Joleen emphasized that measurement tools are only one part of the equation, recalling a quote from Dan Rees, former Director of the Ethical Trading Initiative: “You can’t fatten a pig by weighing it.” In other words, data collection must tie into broader strategy and have a place to land to drive actual improvements. Data should be used to set targets, categorize performance, and adapt approaches rather than just collecting information.

Joleen noted that another benefit of MSIs is that they offer industry-defined standards, benchmarking tools, and assurance that company practices align with established norms and best practices, creating a framework for meaningful and measurable impact.

She also reflected on insights from a recent Cascale annual meeting in Vietnam, where participants, primarily manufacturers, were asked about the main roadblocks to decarbonization. To Joleen’s surprise, rather than citing financing, they pointed to the need for brands and retailers to prioritize clearer, more aligned requirements and stronger collaboration between sustainability and sourcing teams. This exchange underscored that industry collaboration and consistent standards are critical to driving progress.

Making the Business Case

Making the business case for sustainability, particularly when it comes to human rights and social or labor impacts, has often been challenging due to the difficulty quantifying the business benefits. This challenge becomes even greater during times of uncertainty or financial pressure, when sustainability teams and budgets are frequently among the first to face cuts as they operate within a cost center.

Joleen pointed to the ROSI framework (Return on Sustainable Investment), developed by NYU’s Center for Sustainable Business, as a valuable tool for assessing intangible benefits such as reputational risk. She noted that this framework can help sustainability professionals articulate and defend the value of their work when traditional measures of return on investment are harder to demonstrate.

If you’re interested in joining our internal guest speaker series or exploring a collaboration with Article One, please reach out at hello@articleoneadvisors.com.