The Matcha Initiative
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Sammie is the Director of Social Impact & Sustainability at Williams-Sonoma.
At Williams-Sonoma, she collaborates with leadership across the business to achieve the goal of 75% of products purchased from suppliers who offer worker wellbeing programs by 2030.
She is a CSR practitioner with 20 years of experience. She has managed CSR and sustainability programs at Target, C&A, Abercrombie & Fitch, and American Eagle Outfitters.
I believe figuring out these areas help companies’ CSR/ sustainability programs to stay relevant going forward:
I can help The Matcha Initiative community on all things about social compliance and sustainability, present on relevant topics and share my experience.
I started my career as a CSR compliance auditor and have visited more than 1000 factories around Asia.
Having the opportunity to observe factory working conditions and pollution up front, I am interested to play an active role in businesses to make responsible business decisions.
I am responsible for my company’s factories social compliance and sustainability requirements in Asia and oversees the team outside of US.
In my previous roles, I have created programs to evaluate and improve factories’ labor and environmental performance. One of my recent projects was to develop a methodology to measure social impact quantitatively.
A constant challenge is making a business case to purchase from factories that performance better in social compliance and sustainability, instead of only looking at cost and quality.
Awareness raising continues to be important to get buy in from internal stakeholders and business partners to move away from the ‘business as usual’ mindset. In addition, providing a right incentive and enabling environment e.g. provide capacity building resources will be important to truly show up as partners to create positive impacts.
To have created and revamped CSR programs at American Eagle Outfitters, C&A, Target and currently in Williams-Sonoma.