PPAI’s 2026 Strategic Plan – meant to affirm the Association’s mission into day-to-day purpose carried out over the next five years – includes a Priority Lane that focuses on Sustainability and Responsibility. That priority lane, which weaves through all three pillars and the entire foundation of the Strategic Plan, states that PPAI will “champion a sustainable, responsible future; guiding the industry with stewardship, ethical governance and responsible practices.”
Five years may seem like plenty of time, but to meet these promises, initiatives must be in motion now. Progress takes time, and results take deliberation. Fortunately, PPAI’s leadership, including the Board of Directors, began taking those steps in 2025 when they commissioned an in-depth study analyzing sustainability in the branded merch industry with consultancy firm WAP.
What Is Sustainability In Promo? Check Out This PPAI Resource Page
The study was conducted over a year through research and interviews with dozens of PPAI members. The sheer scope of its findings is tremendous, including an amount of exciting new data so abundant, it’s difficult to process in one sitting. So, PPAI Media will be sharing these results throughout the year in the form of articles, infographics and insights originated from concepts published in the WAP study.
Elizabeth Wimbush, CAS
Director of Sustainability & Responsibility
“This initiative is an impressive demonstration of PPAI’s commitment to both supporting members in their sustainability journeys, while advancing the industry through research-backed and data-driven initiatives,” says Elizabeth Wimbush, CAS, PPAI’s director of sustainability and responsibility. “I’m very proud of the work we did with WAP.”
What: Three Workstreams To Anchor PPAI’s Sustainability Strategy With A Foundational Body Of Research
In 2025, PPAI and the Board of Directors agreed that it would invest to engage with a sustainability-focused consultancy to build a data-driven foundation for the industry’s long-term sustainability strategy.
“As global regulations and consumer sentiment continue to shift in the direction of transparency and responsibility, PPAI needs to make sure it’s equipping members with the right insights to succeed,” says Denise Taschereau, CEO of Fairware, who was board chair at the time the WAP study was commissioned and was instrumental in its initial stages. “We’re at an inflection point where we can and should stop to benchmark, not only our industry efforts, but those of our association peers within the branded merch industry and outside of it,” Taschereau says.
Denise Taschereau
CEO, Fairware
What that data-driven foundation ultimately looked like came down to a three-part process. The study was divided into three “workstreams” that were analyzed to better understand where sustainability’s current evolution stands in branded merch. Those three data-rich workstreams include:
- Industry Association Best Practices
- Sustainability Benchmarking from PPAI Members
- Materiality Validation – creating a matrix for opportunities that consider materiality through the lens of environmental impact and business impact
The chart below is a finding from the third workstream, a materiality matrix that determines a sustainability or social category’s ability to impact both a branded merch company and its stakeholders. In other words, it uses data to simultaneously assess how the company is being affected and how the plant and its people are being affected – an interconnected dynamic.
As you can see, “materiality and waste” make up by far the greatest share of impact in terms of both a company and the stakeholders, i.e. society and the environment.
This type of analysis would not be available or even possible without the hands-on work of a consultancy like WAP, which does more than dig up available data. The above chart requires active conversations with PPAI members. These aren’t static calculations. They’re representative of the constant evolution in sustainability, with different firms at different stages of the journey. You can almost imagine the above circles pulsing, as opposed to numbers stuck in a point in time.
Who: ‘They Had A Depth Of Knowledge And Experience That Was Really Obvious’
PPAI had an initial list of five consultancy firms to potentially carry out this task, which led to multiple requests for proposals.
- These candidates were recommended by PPAI’s Sustainability Action Group, Product Responsibility Action Group, various members as well as by sustainability contacts of Wimbush.
According to Wimbush and Taschereau, WAP, which consults solely on sustainability matters, became a leading candidate from the beginning of the process.
“There was a depth of experience and knowledge that was really obvious,” Wimbush says. “It was clear that WAP had the team that we really wanted to work with on this.”
PPAI didn’t include strict timelines in the RFPs, leaving the possibility for a shorter timeframe for completion. According to Wimbush, however, WAP’s professional pushback about the length of the project (insisting it would take at least 12 months) ended up working in its favor, helping to demonstrate a clear plan.
“When I was looking at the scope of work, I thought, ‘This is really a year-long project,” says Emma McMahon, senior project manager at WAP, who took the lead on the study.
Emma McMahon
Senior Sustainability Manager, WAP
- WAP is also smaller, relative to some consultancies, and offers personalized, hands-on experiences on a first-name basis.
- The benefit of this will be found in the evolving nature of sustainability. Any future work with sustainability through WAP will be handled through basically the same team.
- WAP’s continued work with PPAI isn’t just on a continuum but in a conversation going forward. The Association sees this as healthy information-gathering.
“Our ethos is really creating sustainability through relationship,” McMahon says.
Why: ‘Coming Together To Overcome Headwinds’
This study represented a concrete push forward in sustainability, embodying PPAI’s Strategic Plan in action. It’s meant to clarify PPAI’s strategic direction in sustainability, benchmark peer performance and outline a scalable strategy that the entire branded merch industry can utilize at different capacities.
- Plenty of branded merch firms do sustainability work siloed off on their own. Some share best practices when business is involved.
- Carmichael referred to discovering “information asymmetry” between firms. Some had access to plenty of their own information, and some were feeling around in the dark, unable to take action without that vital data.
- For PPAI to guide in sustainability, information gathering is a key with multiplying effects.
“What became really clear is that lots of folks in the industry are facing really similar problems and are coming up with creative solutions together and that is really an area that’s ripe for that type of collaboration,” McMahon says.
It can’t be overstated how vital it is that this data can serve as a bridge between firms that may be able to collaborate in the future on sustainability projects in large or small ways. Perhaps that is through business partnerships or simply further information sharing.
“The collaborative component of so many of the solutions was really apparent when you looked at it all together,” says Wimbush.
- Stay tuned for more of WAP’s sustainability data to be rolled out through PPAI Media and other PPAI channels.
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