Q&A With Jeff King, Bath & Body Works Group Vice President and Head of ESG
As a global leader in home fragrance and personal care, we don’t just offer products and experiences — we’re also committed to shaping a future that’s resilient, responsible and filled with possibilities. Our efforts towards integrating our sustainability strategy into our business practices brought us closer to fulfilling our environmental, social and governance commitments, one milestone at a time.
In May 2024, we released Bath & Body Works’ second annual ESG report detailing our progress towards those commitments. This report included a Q&A with Jeff King, Group Vice President, Head of ESG, who shared updates on our journey and approach to creating meaningful impact for a brighter future.
As you think about the past year, how would you describe the progress made on ESG?
So much of what we do has strong emotional ties — helping people, building resilient communities and taking care of the planet. Because of that, we are often tempted to just hit ‘start’ on developing programs and taking action. In some areas of our ESG work, we are equipped with the right tools, resources and knowledge and you’ll read a lot about this throughout the report. In particular, we’re highlighting our investment in the personal and professional development of our associates and the impact and ingredient work we’ve begun in support of our Thoughtful Products pillar.
For other areas of our ESG work, I’m equally proud of the often harder work to set baselines and boundaries which will allow us to advance our ESG work and execute against our existing and future ESG goals. Our ESG data acquisition work and the design of our sustainable risk assessment tool are prime examples — these initiatives required intensive work and engagement across the enterprise and will enable us to work with multi-stakeholder organizations and suppliers to reduce social and environmental risks in the supply chain in the future. We still have work to do to finalize our baselines, but we believe we are doing the right things to achieve progress in our three ESG focus areas for years to come.
With new ESG standards/frameworks and emerging regulation in non-financial reporting entering the marketplace, how are you preparing for the future of ESG transparency?
A key update you’ll see in this year’s ESG report is a shift in the data timing parameters — from calendar year in 2022 to fiscal year in 2023 and future years. This was intentional as we now know the expectations are to align the timing of our sustainability reporting to our financial reporting. Although we acknowledge we still have work to refine our data collection processes, and in some cases ensure our data is externally assured, this is the direction we need to go.
At the same time, we’re also thinking of how to make information more digestible for our readers and how we’re identifying the right channels to reach our stakeholders. Last year, we complemented our first ESG report with a complete overhaul of our bbwinc.com corporate site. We started to populate the site with information on ESG that we believe won’t substantially change year-over-year. This allows our ESG report to really focus on what happened and what we accomplished over the past year.
Understanding how important internal support is, how have your internal stakeholders responded and engaged with your new ESG strategy?
Our associates are at the heart of everything we do, and our ESG work is no exception. The only way we will meet our commitments is by continuing to keep our associates engaged in our journey as they are the ones who will get us to a brighter tomorrow. While the ESG strategy we introduced in last year’s report was new for our company, sustainability was something that already existed at the company and in the hearts of our associates who have an incredible passion for making positive impacts inside and outside of work. The feedback we’ve received from our associates on our ESG strategy has been extremely positive. They celebrated the launch of our first ESG report and continue to ask for updates on ESG, which we’re delivering in creative ways, like digital billboards in our home offices and interactive learning sessions. We are also fortunate to have ESG champions in every corner of the business, aiding us in our journey to integrate sustainability into existing business practices. Their energy, thoughtfulness and dedication to our ESG work constantly inspires me.
How are you thinking about emerging topics, like biodiversity, that are bubbling to the top of sustainability agendas?
We’ve all heard the phrase ‘the great circle of life,’ which is a simple way of describing the interconnectedness that is biodiversity, which sustains all life. We all have an important role to play in nature and biodiversity preservation to protect precious ecosystems — not just for ourselves, but for our children and future generations. When we were building our strategy in 2022, we thought about biodiversity impacts through the lens of climate change, but to make a meaningful difference, we will need to focus on biodiversity as its own topic because it’s an important part of what I believe will be our shared legacy. So, with our business partners, our ESG team monitors emerging issues like this, and this past year, we worked with the Environmental Defense Fund to develop a better understanding of the risks and opportunities related to biodiversity, as well as water. This research gave us a leading indication of how we can start to strategically think about biodiversity.
We look forward to expanding upon this work in the future and continuing to keep up with emerging issues to ensure that we’re staying true to our commitment to take care of the things that matter most.
To learn more about our ESG journey and to read our latest report, visit bbwinc.com.