CEO Sustainability Series | Stephan Veyret, Singapore Country Leader, Decathlon

Question 1 : What has your company’s sustainability journey been like so far?

Our company sustainability journey has picked up it’s momentum when we had a transition plan on how to reduce our emission of C02 by 90% and a reporting put in place for each entity to measure our C02 emissions. We had make the change quickly to reduce affecting our business operations. All our sustainability targets are for 2026 and the four pillars of the plan focuses:

1. Value chain: Introducing a circular business such as repair, renting, buyback, second life and C2C sales till the end of life instead of a linear one (13% TO share by 2026). Changing the way we design, manufacture, and conceive products that either last longer or emit less C02 than its predecessor without compromising on quality with our eco-design products (100% in 2026)

2. Customers: Reaching out to the community to organise beach & urban clean ups to promote awareness and introduce recycling points in our stores.

3. Teammates: Each project and teammate has a “Planet KPI” where teammates are trained on awareness of climate change through Climate Fresk and a SD trainings.

4. Operations: Remove single-use plastic in our e-commerce operations, create shopping bags from recyclable material, recycle logistics waste, and use of new energy sources such as having a solar panel roof.

Q2 : How do you see expectations and attitudes towards sustainability changing among your employees, customers and partners? And what is the impact on your organisation?

Within our teammates, most of them fall in the Millennial and Gen Z age groups who are conscious and critical of how we operate. They are our sources of ideas to drive change and are excited to learn about the transformation upstream which impacts them daily.

For our customers, we have seen that they do not necessarily embrace climate actions solely for environmental reasons. Affordable prices, convenience and healthier lifestyles could boost sustainable consumption. Thankfully we are in the business of sport! When these factors are addressed in the purchase journey, they are well received by our customers.

Our partners have been careful with the selection of our suppliers, and those that have been working with us, have been meeting our requests with greater consciousness of the planet in mind. Despite the complexity, they understand that demands are changing. One example is the use of FSC material for our communications.

Q3 : On a company level, you have set high targets, especially when it comes to environment and climate change. What’s the key to achieving these targets?

Transparency on the CO2 emissions data is really important to prioritise our efforts. We need the humility to understand that sustainable development is a constant work in progress. Consistency in actions & integration of SD initiatives into our performance indicators. To ensure that targets are met, consistent efforts to change the mind-sets (training & town halls), implement the actions and review the results monthly like we do for most OKR’s.

Sustainability like sports is a team game; a constant network of collaboration between partners and organisations is needed to be built in order to achieve scalable and reliable results.