The outdoor apparel industry has a problem it hasn't solved yet: it needs to keep growing revenue while selling fewer products.

W. L. Gore & Associate’s (Gore) fabrics business makes the high-performance waterproof, windproof, breathable material innovations behind some of the most trusted outdoor brands in the world. Their business model, like most of the industry, depends on volume growth. More jackets sold, more revenue earned. But with tightening regulations and mounting sustainability targets, that equation is breaking down.

The industry needs to grow revenue without growing volume. And nobody has figured out how to do it at scale. This doesn’t imply replacing existing models but rather exploring complementary approaches that can expand how growth is achieved.

Peter Roeber, Gore Fabric’s Director of Venture Development, and his team could have focused on the usual playbook: reduce waste, swap materials, tighten processes. Instead, they did something different. They built a circular venture from within the growth function, combining sustainability thinking with venture-building capability rather than running them as separate workstreams. And they flipped the innovation process on its head. Instead of starting with a consumer problem, they started with a system-level challenge, designed a business model that could address it, and then went looking for the consumers it could serve.

The result? An early-stage venture, currently in a pilot phase and validating product-market fit, with real consumers and real willingness to pay. But how did they get there, and what can other innovation leaders learn from their experiment?

For most large organizations, sustainable innovation occupies a familiar and frustrating position. The ambition is real and the targets are set, but the outcomes almost always land in the same place: cost savings, efficiency gains, incremental improvements. Two structural patterns explain why.

When sustainability can't be connected to growth in a language that leadership recognizes, it tends to be treated as a cost to manage rather than an opportunity to build. Within that framing, it rarely competes successfully for the resources it needs to generate real impact at scale.

The unlock, Peter argues, is integration.

When sustainability thinking is integrated into the part of the organization that builds new ventures, it expands the opportunity from cost savings toward generating meaningful new value.

Sustainability thinking needs to sit inside innovation and growth teams, not just in the dedicated sustainability function. When the people who understand circularity and systems-level impact are in the rooms where new ventures are being designed, growth teams start seeing sustainability challenges as venture opportunities, and sustainability teams gain the business model fluency to frame their work as a growth lever rather than a cost line.

The term "stealth sustainability" (a term popularized by JoAnn Garbin, former Microsoft Innovation Leader) captures a principle: instead of leading with the environmental benefit, lead with a solution that better serves consumers' unmet needs and that happens to be more sustainable by design.

The logic is pragmatic. Most consumers won't pay a premium for sustainability, and greenwashing fatigue has made the word itself a liability. Stealth sustainability works with consumer behavior as it is: people choose the solution that best meets their needs. If that solution also reduces environmental impact, the benefit arrives without requiring anyone to sacrifice, pay more, or change their habits.

This applies internally in an organization too. When a sustainable venture is framed as a compliance exercise, it competes for a limited sustainability budget. When it's framed as a strategic growth opportunity backed by evidence, a billion-dollar organization will fund it through its growth budget instead.

These two shifts —integration and stealth sustainability— moved the Gore team into different territory. But the more fundamental change was in how they approached the innovation process itself.

Beyond the organizational shifts, there's a more fundamental change required in how sustainable ventures get built. Most sustainable innovation still follows the traditional path: “identify a consumer problem, build a solution, bring it to market”.

But the sustainability challenges putting the most pressure on large organizations right now didn't come from consumers. They came from regulators tightening requirements, industry economics shifting underneath existing business models, and the growing realization that models built on linear resource consumption have a shelf life. When the problem lives at the system level and no consumer is asking for a solution, the standard innovation playbook breaks down.

Gore is confronting this directly. As an ingredient brand, Gore makes the high-performance fabrics that outdoor brands use in jackets, pants, footwear, and gloves. Both Gore and their brand partners share the same structural challenge: their business models depend on volume growth. Revenue growth has historically meant selling more units, which can increase resource use and environmental impact. As sustainability expectations and regulatory pressures evolve, there is growing interest in exploring alternative models that can support both. The industry needs to find a way to keep growing revenue without growing volume.

At the time the Gore team began this work, no one in the outdoor apparel industry had yet demonstrated how to do it at scale. Gore’s unique role in the ecosystem created an opportunity to explore solutions that could unlock value not just for Gore, but for its partners across the industry.

The Gore team recognized that the traditional innovation sequence (start with a consumer problem, then build toward a solution) would not work here and deliberately inverted it. The method they followed maps to what they describe as the Reverse Fit Venture Framework, a five-step model for building strategic growth ventures that just happen to be sustainable:

The organizational problem (Step 1) was clear: Gore and their brand partners were beginning to explore how revenue growth could be decoupled from volume growth, with the aim of better aligning financial performance and sustainability goals.

From there, the team moved to Step 2: envisioning a system-level solution. Drawing on extensive landscape research across industries (not just apparel, but automotive, electronics, and anywhere product-as-a-service, subscription, or rental models had been attempted), and learning from what had failed just as carefully as what had succeeded, they developed a set of potential models that could address the challenge at scale. Alongside this, early customer discovery helped uncover unmet needs that could be better served by these models, informing the hypotheses explored in Step 3.

The most promising concept became the foundation of the venture: a circular platform in outdoor performance apparel, using usership (product-as-a-service at scale) as the core strategy to separate revenue growth from volume growth at an industry level.

The Gore venture applies usership, a product-as-a-service strategy, to outdoor performance apparel at industry scale. It enables Gore to extend its role beyond materials into helping partners access circular growth opportunities, leveraging the strength and trust of their brand. Rather than consumers purchasing jackets, pants, and gear that sit in closets for most of their lifespan, they access premium products through a service. The service handles product selection, care, repair, and cycling between users.

This approach ensures that garments featuring Gore’s Technology are used as intended for as long as possible, maximizing their lifespan and performance. It also opens access to a broader audience who may wish to experience premium garments without the need for ownership, while generating revenue through multiple use cycles rather than a single point of sale. When a product reaches the end of its usable life, it enables an end-of-life pathway: upcycling, deconstruction for recycled materials, or repurposing.

The ambition behind the usership strategy is explicitly circular.

Many industries today operate on linear models, where products are made, sold, and eventually exit the system. As sustainability expectations evolve, there is growing interest in more circular approaches that extend product life and reduce resource intensity. In the outdoor apparel industry, usership is being explored as one such model, where products remain in active use through care and repair, and end-of-life materials can be recaptured and reintroduced into the system.

The ambition goes beyond doing less harm within the existing linear model. It aims to build a fundamentally different system where revenue growth and resource consumption are no longer coupled.

For the venture to work, it has to create value for every participant in the ecosystem: Gore as the performance ingredient laminate supplier, the outdoor brands as partners, the service providers who enable the logistics, specialty retailers who help serve the consumer, and the consumers who use the products.

Asking internal stakeholders to invest in a venture without a defined customer segment or a validated consumer problem is an uncomfortable position for any innovation team. When the Gore team presented the scale of the industry challenge and the potential growth and impact opportunity, the case was strong enough to secure initial investment. This allowed them to begin searching for consumers who would be better served by a usership model than by traditional ownership.

The team structured the opportunity around three problem statements, each capturing a different stakeholder perspective:

The solution the team was building needed to address all three.

With the three problem statements defined, the team began building and testing potential solutions. The first phase included extensive landscape research, spanning not just outdoor apparel but automotive, electronics, and any industry where product-as-a-service, subscription, or rental models had been attempted. That research shaped a set of system-level solutions the team believed could address all three problem statements, and built enough confidence to begin testing with real consumers.

Once the solution set was in place, the team moved to find the consumers it could serve. Using smoke testing (social media ads driving to a landing page with a waitlist signup), they put the value proposition in front of a real audience.

The messaging led with what consumers actually care about: access to premium gear from their favorite brands through a single subscription, without the upfront cost, the research burden, or the commitment of ownership. Outdoor gear is expensive and the category is intimidating for people entering the space. The proposition addressed that directly.

The sustainability benefit (garments staying in use longer, care and repair included, end-of-life managed by the service) was built into the model's architecture, but it wasn't the headline of the ad. This is stealth sustainability in practice: the consumer sees a better solution to their problem, and the environmental impact is delivered by the system behind it.

Around 200 consumers signed up for the venture's waitlist. At that stage, the team couldn't yet segment or characterize who they were, and didn't have a clear picture of all the jobs to be done. But the volume of signups, from a relatively small-scale smoke test, indicated that demand for this type of service extended well beyond a niche audience.

The 200 signups became the basis for the team's next investment case. At Gore, the venture progressed through a series of investment gates, each one requiring the team to present:

The team aligned on the biggest uncertainties and underlying assumptions, using targeted, cost-effective experiments to test them. As these uncertainties were reduced, the business case was progressively strengthened, enabling stakeholders to confidently release the next round of investment.

Subsequent research dug deeper into the waitlist population, identifying multiple jobs to be done that these consumers believed the service would better fulfill. Eventually the team narrowed to a primary beachhead: a consumer group they could clearly define, characterize, and build opportunity assessments around.

The Gore experience shows that doing good while driving growth don't have to compete. A venture built from the system level, positioned as a strategic growth play, and designed to be sustainable by architecture rather than by marketing, can earn serious investment and reach real consumers.

The Reverse Fit framework gives innovation leaders a structured starting point for ventures where the originating problem is systemic rather than consumer-driven. The usership strategy shows what that looks like in outdoor apparel, but the logic applies wherever an industry needs to decouple growth from resource consumption and no consumer is asking for the solution.

What the venture represents is one potentially large lever in a broader shift that requires multiple complementary models: subscription services addressing one segment, resale and second-hand markets addressing another, repair services extending product life across both, material innovation changing what goes into production in the first place.

Each moves a portion of the industry closer to circularity; the more they reinforce each other, the faster the overall shift accelerates.

But Gore’s approach has already moved from principle to practice, from hypothesis to a live platform with real consumers making real commitments. For innovation leaders still running sustainability and growth as separate workstreams, that may be the most useful signal of all.

It started with a blank sheet of paper and a question nobody had thought to ask.

By 2019, Microsoft had been building data centers for roughly two decades. Each new generation was more efficient than the last, but the fundamental design never changed: large industrial boxes on cleared land, consuming vast amounts of energy and water, giving nothing back to the places they occupied. In The Netherlands, farm-centric towns watched industrial campuses appear in the middle of tulip fields. Resistance to new data center construction was growing.

That year, JoAnn Garbin was recruited into Microsoft's innovation organization to work at the intersection of sustainability and the built environment. She joined a team of six, and within their first months they posed a question that had never been asked internally. Microsoft was 15 years into building data centers. Technology had progressed, the climate had changed, communities had changed— but not data centers. So what would one look like, designed from scratch?

JoAnn and her team didn't frame this as a sustainability project. Their starting point was a business question: what does Microsoft need to build and operate for the next 15 to 30 years to support the growth of the business? They started fresh with a blank sheet of paper and challenged every assumption about what a data center had to be, following the same diverge-converge-synthesize cycle that drives innovation projects across Microsoft.

It wasn't until they worked through these assumptions that regenerative design emerged as the answer. JoAnn calls this approach "stealth sustainability": lead with a better solution, and have sustainability live in the architecture rather than the pitch.

For the first five months of the project, through to early 2020, the team cast the net wide. They interviewed engineers who had been designing data centers for the full life of the industry. They talked to communities hosting existing facilities. They studied how different locations around the world each presented fundamentally different design challenges.

By early 2020, all of that research converged into a single hypothesis: what if data centers could work with nature— and give back more than they take?

In the six weeks that followed, the team pressure-tested that hypothesis with 200 stakeholders across the organization and distilled what they heard into a set of guiding principles. One principle became the defining constraint: there should be a mutual benefit for every stakeholder, with nature counted as a stakeholder equal to Microsoft and the local community.

Far from limiting the team, this three-way test pushed them past the obvious. Ideas that optimized for Microsoft's operational costs at nature's expense were off the table. Ideas that appealed to communities but added cost without business return didn't survive either. What remained had to work for all three— and that constraint, it turned out, was generative.

The principles were still being developed when the team began proving the concept on the ground. At the existing data center campus in Amsterdam, they noticed that the land around the facility was completely barren. Their response was biomimetic landscaping— designed to restore biodiversity around the perimeter while also improving security and reducing noise and light pollution.

The community's response was striking. A conversation that had been "we don't want you here" became something else entirely. Residents who had watched industrial campuses displace farmland started asking: why don't all data centers do this? And then: can you help us communicate this to Google and Meta and Amazon, so that when they come into The Netherlands, they do this too?

That shift—from opposition to advocacy, from a local objection to an industry-level demand— was the signal that something more than an efficiency gain had been achieved.

By the time the regenerative data center design reached maturity, the numbers spoke for themselves: a payback period of less than one year on the innovation investment and an internal rate of return above 70%. Even one of the design's multiple value layers represents a billion-dollar opportunity— enough to secure three times the year-over-year investment in further innovation.

Before she left Microsoft in September 2024, regenerative design had been established as a formal program and discipline within the company. Her team created one of the first Director of Biomimicry roles in any large company, and the first in big tech.

For innovation leaders working on infrastructure, real estate, or any built environment challenge where community resistance is a growing constraint— the question is worth borrowing. It's the same instinct behind the Gore circular venture covered earlier in this issue: start with a better solution, and let the sustainability follow from the architecture.

For more insights about considering sustainability as an opportunity for innovation and growth, check these curated resources.

That’s it for today.

Hope you enjoyed this fifth edition of the Compass. Next time, we’ll go back to the basics: (re)designing innovation teams to deliver upon our core “jobs”.

Hans Balmaekers
Founder, the Compass and Chief @ Innov8rs

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