This is the first in a series of interviews with sustainability leaders in business. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Fast facts about Marcus Chung

Current role: vice president of social responsibility and vendor compliance at The Children’s Place, a clothing retailer with about 1,100 stores in North America
Lives in: San Francisco
Education: bachelor’s from Wesleyan University, master’s in business administration from University of California at Berkeley’s Haas School of Business
First job: other than helping my mom in her small retail store in Los Altos, California, I was a research associate with the Corporate Executive Board in Washington DC
Who or what inspires him: Stories of individuals who are able to overcome great institutional inertia – business, government, societal expectations – in order to achieve greatness
Weekend passion: eating my way through San Francisco’s amazing culinary offerings
If I wasn’t doing this I would be: working on behalf of underrepresented communities at a mission-driven organization or company, nonprofit, B corp, etc

What’s your greatest accomplishment?

At The Children’s Place, I’m proud to have built partnerships that invest in worker education and empowerment, like HERproject in partnership with BSR.

Most companies in the apparel industry have built factory-auditing programs, but I believe that companies need to go beyond factory auditing in order to truly improve working conditions and make a positive difference in workers’ lives.

I’ve seen firsthand the tremendous benefits this approach brings: both to workers who demonstrate greater confidence, better communication skills and a deeper understanding of how to support their families, and to factory owners who see higher worker retention rates, greater productivity and even improved product quality.

Your biggest frustration?

Ultimately, we need factory owners and other actors in the industry to take more accountability for the wellbeing of garment workers worldwide.

My team works tirelessly every day to improve communities and factory working conditions around the world. They’re on the front lines identifying problems and trying to influence change where possible. But we can only influence.

What’s your goal for the next year?

While we’ve been building a foundation for a strengthened approach to corporate responsibility – with an updated Supplier Code of Conduct, new team members and some additional strategic partners – next year will be focused on measuring impact. I want to test the effectiveness of our efforts, double down on the things that are working and course-correct where necessary.

What story can you tell us about a lesson learned?

We faced a serious situation when one of my team members was evaluating a new factory as a potential supplier. We discovered that the factory was knowingly employing underage workers. Since we have strict worker minimum age requirements, my team worked swiftly to protect the young workers by removing them from the factory and ensuring they were paid the wages that they would otherwise make until they reached the legal working age. We did not approve this factory to produce goods for our company.

Our job was done, so it would have been easy to stop there. But I knew this presented a problem to our product sourcing team.

In apparel production time is of the essence. Falling behind even one week on a production schedule could have consequences like missing a critical store delivery or adding additional pressure on factories to meet deadlines – thereby causing excessively long overtime hours for workers.

So we partnered on a parallel path to find an alternate factory. Along with colleagues in sourcing and quality assurance, my team adjusted priorities, shifted schedules and evaluated a factory that fortunately met our social and environmental standards. Within one week we were able to present a viable alternative to the original factory, securing a critical resource to manufacture our product.

The lesson is that the importance of being business-focused and solutions-oriented cannot be overstated.

Away from work, what do you do to live more sustainably?

I live in San Francisco, where sustainability is part of the ethos. We have great farmers’ markets, restaurants that serve local, sustainable cuisine, and an advanced infrastructure for recycling and composting. I’ve even visited the city’s recycling facility to understand how single-stream recycling works behind the scenes!

One of the biggest changes I’ve made was selling my car two years ago. Now I rely on public transportation and Zipcar [a car sharing service] to get around.

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