Clair

Fortune partnered with Great Place to Work to analyze survey feedback representing nearly 100,000 U.S. employees.

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Employees say: 
 
"Clair is truly a special place to work because of the supportiveness and collaborativeness of the people. Everybody is so eager to help and do the right thing."

65 Best Small and Medium Workplaces in New York

These are the best workplaces in the U.S. that employ between 10 and 99 people.

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Employees say: 
 
“Our company culture is quite unique: from weekly shout-outs to great achievements and teammates celebrations, to a monthly "failure of the month award", everyone here is great at encouraging new ideas and dealing with setbacks in a positive and supportive manner. Leadership also has a great way to make everyone feel as part of the company family - for Christmas they sent out unique gifts to each employee based on their interests!”

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Clair Company Profile, Stock Price, News, Rankings

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Clair Company Profile, Stock Price, News, Rankings | Fortune

Anna Harman, a former lawyer and Bridgewater asset manager, is a mom of two who has remained at the helm of Studs since she founded it in 2019.

Studs’ 39-year-old founder ditched her law career to launch the adult version of Claire’s

Features

So this is a studs escape. It's our signature yellow ear. It has a wide assortment of both piercings to illustrate the types of piercings you could get at studs as well as all of our fashion jewelry. And we actually use these to help people see both the jewelry as well as the types of piercings they could get. Hi. My name is Anna Harmon. I'm 39 years old. I'm the CEO and co founder of Studs and this is my secret to success. I grew up in Westchester, right outside of New York City. My father was an architect. My mom was an executive and a big role model for me. I went to school at the same school for my entire time from kindergarten to 12th grade. And then I went to Princeton University and I studied English right after I graduated from college, I went to Boston University for law school. I had always known that I wanted to go to law school and potentially be a lawyer. I was a mutual fund formation lawyer which is unfortunately about as boring as it sounds and was part of the reason I stopped practicing law, I knew I never wanted to be a partner at a law firm. So that was never my goal. Um And then when I left, uh being a lawyer, I went on to go work at an asset manager called Bridgewater. So I spent a little under five years at Bridgewater. I then left and I went to a start up that was funded and founded by a former very senior Bridgewater person. We actually sold that business after about two years. And I went to work at Wal Mart's Incubator and spent another about two years there primarily working on a business that was a text to shopping business called Jet Black. So I started thinking about studs because I had a sort of shrink piercing experience while working at Jet Black. I went to get another piercing about five or six years ago. Now, a second piercing on my left ear and I went to a very fancy piercing parlor downtown and they told me I would have to wait about two hours and I probably would have spent 500 or $750. And I ended up going to the tattoo parlor and I had a really good experience piercing wise at the tattoo parlor. It was done healthily and safely with a needle. And I really liked my piercer, but I didn't like the jewelry and it was still expensive and I was very personally out of place at the tattoo parlor. And so then I actually started to do research to understand. Well, what had happened to the mall brands that I remembered going to when I was growing up and what I learned was there really isn't a place to go until studs. Once you've graduated from those mall brands, if you want to get a piercing on your ear, done with a needle with a cute selection of earrings, that concept didn't exist. Nobody had created it. And so I felt like, well, I would have wanted to go there. So what if that were the business that I were to start? When you think of the mall brands that you visit? The first thing I think you think of is they're meant for younger customers. In particular, Claire is really self described as targeted at tweens studs, core demographic is 18 to 35 and our median age is actually 27. And so everything we think about in terms of the store experience, the store design, how we actually want people to interact with. The brand is for an older customer that Claire's was really never designed for. To me, we were filling a hole in the market, taking us back to November of 2019. We're opening the first stud studio in Nolita. I am five months pregnant, I guess, or four months pregnant thereabouts. And it was interesting, you know, when you start a start up and it's a physical experience, meaning it's a store right at some level, it's real like this is going to work or it's not going to work. And what was fascinating was it worked from day one. We had lines out the door at the Nolita Studio the first weekend. And so that was really validating for Lisa and I, because when you are selling products online, nobody knows how many products you're selling. Right on day one, you might sell nothing. You might sell two right units of whatever it is you're making for. If you start a store, people know if people are in the store with you. And so we felt really lucky and inspired that the thing we had created was generating both that much buzz that Lisa had created and that people wanted the product that we made. Well, when we first started, you know, working in a co working space, we funded it ourselves. We obviously weren't spending much money on it, but we spent probably 4 to 6 months pre fundraise investing in the business by ourselves. Then we went out and fund raised for our seed round in, I would say February of 2019 ish. We raised a little north of 3 million. So COVID was really, I think out of total left field for us. So we had launched the first studio in November of 2019 and we had launched a second studio actually in Hudson Yards in late late February of 2020 about weeks before obviously, the world shut down and we were super lucky to have raised another round of financing right before COVID happened, also about two weeks before the world shut down. And so we were well positioned financially, but obviously the business had to close for about six months. And at the time I was eight months pregnant. And I remember being really concerned one, what would happen to me, to my child, to everyone in my family's lives because of this. But also what would happen to our business, which at the end of the day, right, post COVID, we were so lucky to see people come back and wanna get piercings again. But we were questioning at the beginning of COVID whether that would be true. I think the biggest thing about the secret to success for studs is again, the amazing experience that the studio team provides to customers every single day. And so we really focus at studs on. How can we continue to enable that from our HQ office? Because the reason people like studs is because studs has great reviews and because they have a great experience at studs and then they tell their friends.

Sanjeevan Bala, Media and Entertainment Leader, Non Executive Director, Bakkavor, SThree; Advisor, DataIQ, Gartner Clare Hickie, Chief Technology Officer, EMEA, Workday   Stuart Martin, Director, Group People Operations and People Platform Leader, Lloyds Banking Group

Brainstorm AI London 2024: Making AI Work At Work

Photography by Joe Maher / Fortune Brainstorm AI

Conferences

Sanjeevan Bala, Gartner, Clare Hickie, Workday, Stuart Martin, Lloyds Banking Group

So we're going to take a few minutes now to hear from three people in the audience who have direct experience with using these technologies in business. Uh The tough part about this is they each have two minutes and only two minutes to introduce themselves and tell you what they're doing that may be relevant to you. And Sanji Van Bala, uh please you go first. Thank you. So, I'm I've been the uh chief data and A I officer for a number of media entertainment companies. And this is true of many of these companies. We're trying to do three things, effectively acquire consumers, get to watch more content and moize that content. We've deployed A I across all three of those use cases. And in some areas we've seen reductions uh that would take us process that three months down to three minutes. Other areas we've deployed uh increase in advertising yields. My top four learnings. Firstly, this is all about change and people change, the golden ratio is 70 2010 70% on people change 20% on technology and data, 10% on the algorithms. Secondly, uh proof of concept, I wouldn't bother with proof of concepts. Because proof of concept is proof of cost. I've moved to a model of proof of value because you map the value with business stakeholders and get the business stakeholders to buy into that value case. Third, learning is the last mile fix the last mile first. So that's the process in marketing the technology and what people skilling do you need to do to enable the last mile of value realization and finally develop FOMO measure the benefits and get more to talk about those benefits. The other stakeholders then want to have some of those benefits as well. Boy, that's, that's great advice. If you all didn't write it down. 70 2010 rule, which is uh 70% of it is about the people. Yeah. Um uh Number two was uh come on, help me last mile, get the last mile and create FOMO uh uh to, to, to get, get people in. Thank you for that. Next up is Claire Hickey from work day, Claire, please. Hi, thank you very much. Can I just say it's really hard for an Irish person to talk in two minutes. Um So my name is Claire Hickey. I'm the CTO for me at work day. Fascinating afternoon. Um One thing I'm gonna pick up on is their own skills in particular and it is around one is obviously the fear of the job lost and is the computer going to take over my jobs and everything that goes with it. Can I just say three things on this one is who knows what's going to happen, but it's always going to need humans. And the biggest right that we have and it's been demonstrated time and time today is the right of decision making. No matter what other skill may be taken by the computer, the power of the decision is not going to be taken away. So let's upskill on that one alone. The second one is upskilling without A I, it's really hard to upskill. And the third one is use A I to identify the talent gap in your organizations and use it to be able to upskill your employees in your organizations. It costs, it's six times more expensive to recruit externally than it is to absolutely upskill your workers and you are going to be able to retain that talent at the same time. So start using A I to equally develop your talent and identify your talent, but equally look at it in terms of what you need from a skills gap perspective internally to help your employees upskill. But where are you going with your organizations to remain with that competitive edge? What do you need from a skills perspective and identify it even externally to be able to fill that gap? So you're all successful. Did I do that in two minutes? And it was great. It was great. Uh uh Thank you for that. I think the emphasis on upskilling is so so important. And thank you for re emphasizing that. And finally, Stuart Mark Martin from Lloyds Banking Stuart, I, I'm going to face this way. Uh Certainly so two minutes to talk about some of the challenges solutions uh and lessons learned ain't going to happen. Uh So I'll focus really just on the challenges that I've, that I've seen in quite a few of them were quite familiar from, from today. So first thing to acknowledge that quite a number of people probably think this is a fad that's going to pass them by. That's a challenge. We have so few years ago, we probably sat here talking about we are or the metaverse or something to solve the world's crisis. So it's good to see it's going to stay. And so the challenge we have is to make sure people don't sit on the sidelines and think it can pass them by and not participate. So I think how we get, how we do that is going to be important. So this not seen as a bit of a fad. Uh that leads me to the second challenge. I think we all have to really face into and that is that we need a very different approach to the total world of work. So I have an hr hr background. So A I is impacting and will continue to impact every single facet of our, the way we work, what we do, how we do it when we do it, where we do it, which device we use to do it and which uh which even which environment we used to do it. So if you haven't picked up on that yet, um you know, that's going to be a substantial challenge. And I think as businesses and as senior leaders, our challenge is how do you uh grapple with that? How do you make it, uh you know, something real and how do we choose to work in that sort of environment? Very, very complex but very exciting third challenge, speed and complexity. Um you know, things are happening so fast. I think someone asked earlier about, you know, what's gonna happen the next decade? I think when you think about what's happening next week. So what's the, you know, what's the speed things are having such speed and complexity, everyone's trying to study the next unicorn, this is faster, this is better, this is more cost effective. And so I think the risk we have is that our workforce will just tune out and not participate in in all of this. And, and I've been given the nod to close up so that the final one I'll keep it quite short is, you know, how do we uh the risk we have is um engaging our evolving workforce, multi generational uh where we are today and working longer if we need to. So how do we um you know, increase uh the workforce and make work fundamentally more engaging and increase the digital literacy that we need to be successful. Great. Thank you very much. Thank you all three of you for sharing those. Stuart. I love the fact you talked about how this is going to change every single facet of what you do because I think that's one of the things that large organizations are struggling with. Everyone's doing experiments, everybody, everyone's doing trials. But the question that this next panel that we're going to have is going to address is how do you get from the trial stage to implementing these technologies at scale?

Rajiv Sharma, Chief Executive Officer, Coats Marjorie Yang, Chairman, Esquel Group Moderated By Claire Zillman, Fortune 

Innovation Forum 2024: Sustainable Supply Chains

So we're here to talk about sustainability in the textile industry. Um And the industry itself, apparel and footwear are responsible for between eight and 10% of global emissions. So that's, that's more than aviation, more than shipping. So if I I want to start by identifying a few of the culprits here, so we have energy use, water use and the materials that go into these goods, a lot of which are oil based. So I'm wondering Raje if you could start by sort of picking one of those and talking about some of the solutions that coats has come up with to address, you know, the emissions and waste involved in, in those components of the industry. All right, I guess before we get to the solution, I just want to quantify the problem that we have. Right. So uh um there are about 100 to 150 billion garments manufactured in the world. There are about 8 billion people on this planet and the West consumes far more garments than the East. Alright, even though the majority of the garments are manufactured in the East, but the West uh produces a lot, the other thing that's happening is uh in the last 20 years, the advent of online retailers and the growth of fast fashion brands has generated a lot of consumerism and a lot of sales at the retail level. This cheap garments pro and you sort of culture uh became very prevalent in, in the early 20 you know, two thousands and uh and the last decade and this is an industry where one garbage truck of garments is dumped into the ground or burnt every second, every second. So you can imagine the extent. The other thing is one third of the microplastic waste in the oceans is generated from textiles. So all the fish and the and the, and the sea life eats a lot of the plastics and that ends up on, on your dinner table, which is not really good because you're eating sort of microplastics along with that. So we have a big problem that needs to be solved and um the solution will have to come through multiple stakeholders. I think it starts with consumers. Consumers need to figure out a way to reduce consumption. And me coming from the industry, it's counterintuitive for me to say, buy less, right? But if I put my sustainability hat on. Absolutely. You've got to start with responsible consumption. The second thing is reuse or extend the life of garments. It can be done by repair, it can be, you know, you know, sort of resale, et cetera and the third thing is recycle. So that's on the consumer side, the industry has a role to play, especially around material transition, chemical transition. This is an industry that is heavily dependent on oil based materials, whether it's chemicals, dyes, et cetera, et cetera. Even if you look at cotton, actually, I got an interesting data. A simple T shirt, a regular cotton t-shirt consumes about 2200 L of water to manufacture. And that's roughly about the water consumption of one individual for 2.5 years and that's just one t-shirt. So, you know, this is a very resource intensive industry. We have to find new materials, new manufacturing processes. And I think we are, we are at a stage where incrementalism is not going to work. You need breakthroughs, you know, technological breakthroughs, regulatory breakthroughs. I think governments have have a role to play here and Europe is taking a leading role in terms of finding ways to uh you know, either tax consumers or tax the industry. There is, you know, there are talks of carbon tax, et cetera. But overall, I would say that between governments, consumers and the industry, each one has a role to play. And um it's, it's gonna be a long hard road, it will take time, but we have to start. And so what are some of the solutions that, that you've come up with at coast? Can you just talk about one specifically? So we consume a lot of water, uh we are investing in water that dying. So, essentially disrupting our own manufacturing processes and using technology to help us um you know, apply color on threads without the use of water. That's one, the second thing is we are working with suppliers, especially the upstream suppliers at the polymer level, the fiber and filament polymer. So in basic chemistry, if you can make changes, then you use less chemicals. And I think the whole purpose is to use less chemicals, less water, less time. Uh And that's going to be important. The other thing is then around, you know, you know, material transition, what we are looking at is how do you use post consumer uh industrial waste. So all the garments that everyone's wearing, what happens at the end of life, if you can just recycle that bring it back into the supply chain, that will be great today, only 1% of the apparel comes back into the supply chain. So there's a huge opportunity in terms of recycling and Margie, you've um SCL has innovated with waterless dying too. Am I right about that? But um first I wanted to correct one statement. Sure. Um Thank you so much for saying that we are the um the world's number one largest shirtmaker. Actually, we no longer number two or after, you know, having one of our subsidiaries put on the entity list. Um Most of our customers, us customers ran for the hill. So we are only half our original size. So that's one way to make a company cut carbon emission and order water utilization. However, we checked. So our water consumption or energy consumption doesn't go to half per unit. Energy and water consumption has actually gone up really because when your capacity is at a certain stage and then you abruptly cut it your unit because you're no longer efficiently using your asset. This is actually very dangerous with so much geopolitics happening. But this is collateral damage in a way geopolitics is hurting our fight to uh against climate change. Just wanted to bring that up. But let's go back to water. I think we both agree that in our industry, water is the most challenging. So as K started by um reducing, reducing the use of water through better management, so we manage better, we can reduce wastage and then reducing wastage means that you can, you've actually reduced water consumption. So we were able to reduce it to about 65% of our original unit consumption. Um Then we use the water. So now we have a big water treatment plant and we are able to reuse some of the water. Our water treatment plant is about 38,000 tons capacity and we can reuse some of that water finally is, as you are saying, replace the use of water. Now, um they're working a lot on synthetics. We because we are a Cotton House. We couldn't use the technology that was developed for synthetics. So we had to um uh we spent 10 years coming up with a way to replace water, which is only a carrier. Remember, water is only a carrier in a dying process. But that takes up about 95% of the total water consumption. And then we replaced it with solvents that can be reused. We can collect about 99.8% of the solvent that is used. So essentially um reducing the use of water in the whole supply chain production and at least in the industrial supply chain to about uh reduce cut out 95%. And then going to recycling, which is a very challenging but a great opportunity. So what we did is we started with our uniform and we used to have 58,000 people. We now only have 28,000 people, but still 28,000 people. Uniform is still quite a good exercise and we use it as an exercise because then we learn from that. It's not so easy to recycle just any garment. Um It has to be designed initially, for example, the label, the the thread because they are all different materials. And then how do you um design with the intention of recycling? We learned even with the uniform where we can have complete control, you have to learn to do that. And then um we have a, a project called loopy where we have 30% reuse uh yarn recycled yarn, but the yarn is a lot weaker. So you're trying to um knit or knit knit shirt, for example, with 30% yarn that is of a different strength than the 70 70% virgin yarn. So these are a lot of interesting challenges. But I, I think as we, you know, as we are in the industry, we are all um moving ahead with innovations to resolve these problems, right? It's interesting what you say about the recycling process actually starting at the design process. Yeah, that's, that's really interesting. Another component of this is transportation that a lot of these garments are shipped from one side of the world to another for the different stages of the production process. I mean, how do you start to, to cut down on that? Do you, I think, I think uh going forward, there'll be shorter supply supply chain. So it's not going to be the long supply chains. Uh speed to market is becoming important. So you need to be within a four or five hour or either uh either flight or truck route to your to your end market. You can't be six weeks away or 10 weeks away from your, from your point of consumption. So short of supply chains, uh improvements in manufacturing technologies, better forecasting accuracy by the brands. The brands are investing a lot of money in terms of trying to understand consumer demand and what, you know, what kind of products they want, et cetera. And I think Sheen is a good example. So Sheen considers themselves to be a big tech, big data company rather than apparel company. And they use consumer insights from that, you know, from tiktok to actually design new products. And they have a two week, two week cycle from, from design to actually the garment being shipped to the consumer. Um So that speed to market is becoming important. And what's happening is this is an industry for the last 3040 years was built for two things and two things. Only maximum production at the lowest unit cost. That was the only thing that mattered in our industry. How much more can you produce? And what's the lowest price you can give me going forward? It's more about how fast can you deliver. What is your compliance? How are you doing on innovation? What's your sustainability track record? How can you help me differentiate my product in the eyes of consumers? So I can charge 5% more. So things like that. So I think we, we are at a very interesting crossroad, but the industry has this legacy model which will take time to unwind and, and one of the, the topics that often comes up in the conversation about sustainably is cost and that if you're going to go green, someone has to pay for it. Um Margie, what's been your experience with that? Do you find your, are you, you know who's paying for this? In your case? Is it the end consumer, consumers never pay more for sustainability? This is just a fact that we've learned over the years. But um there are ways to save money. So I was just teaching, you know, a class in ESG and I was explaining to them that I come, I come from uh the, I shouldn't call the dark school of business management. I was taught that unless you can make money from it, you can't, it can't be sustained. So there is always you have to find cleverer ways of doing things. So sustainability, we saved money. I'll give you an example. I I agree, completely agree with having better use of data, which is, you know, the whole idea of A I is to have better data and then reduce the wastage in the market. Here are some very simple things if you can get the whole company to focus on sustainability, on transportation. So in the industry, the standard is that everybody ships fabric to garment factory in lengths. So the same length, let's say 1000 yards one day, one of our teams said, ah as scout ships fabric from to our own garment factories, why do we make it into the same diameter instead of the same length turns out, you save a lot of transportation costs, you save a lot of packaging cost. Now you say that this is small money, but this is where I think sustainability when you can try get everyone in the company excited about doing it. So you get the benefit of the um the dollars, but you also get the excitement and the sense of pride from the entire workforce and that's worth a lot of money. And Margie, you mean, you brought this up earlier about um being on the, the US entities list and this is something that the company has denied. Um This is over claims of forced labor. Um But you know, in the denial you, you talk about, you know, so being vertically integrated, can you just talk about, you know why that's key to disapproving those claims and sort of how that benefits the business. Otherwise, I don't know how many people know about. Um that is a spinning mill. I don't know if you ever looked into our case, but it's not a garment factory. In fact, it is the most automated spinning bill in our group. Recently. We had a bunch of V CS go, go to Xinjiang because we had to close one of our other mills because of we don't have enough orders. And so we have an innovation village there now and then they went to see visit the mill that was put on the entity list. This is a highly automated air conditioned spinning milk. Why would anybody want to use forced labor? People are dying to come and work there. In fact that the accusation was that we went to a job fair. Well, what is wrong with the government inviting some of your best employers to come and provide opportunities for ethnic minority? So it's, it's really nothing to do with, um, the supply chain. It's, it's more to do with, sometimes if you get caught in a situation, suck it up and move on and that's what we decided to do. We have to eat. And so after that, um as we mentioned, half our um business is gone. But the good thing is for many years as Carol has been talking about climbing the Smiley curve and moving away from being just an OEM all of a sudden this happened. Well, on the one hand, we're still appealing trying to get and in fact, we got a conditional removal because when, when we, the reason we had to file a lawsuit was because our appeal was just pending and it was pending for such a long time, we had to give, give them hello a wake up call. So we filed a legal suit. But in the meantime, we lost a lot of business. We had to, we start to make um change the market change, our market start to sell. Look at um climbing the learning curve. I mean climbing this learning curve. Interesting thing. We've been talking about that for 10 years, how we're gonna transform and we keep talking about it until we get hit with the ent dealers. All of a sudden everybody could do things lead time. As cal I think, you know, we're one of their customers is famous for being very rigid in lead time. Now, the lead time is all of a sudden cut to like a third. Now, I asked my colleagues, how come you, how can you do this? Are you forcing people to do this? They say no boss. This is because we have to eat. So we're gonna, we're innovating all of a sudden, the whole people became a lot more agile rather than being very successful uh in whatever you're doing for a long time. Now that you're under stress, um, you innovate. So it's very interesting. It's, it's been a very, um interesting, I mean, it's very painful. I wouldn't recommend for anybody here. Um But um when you do go through that experience, my recommendation is don't cry over spilled milk. Go and find something else to eat. Wow. And innovating the whole time. Yes. Yes. Well, thank you to, to both of you for joining us. A lot of um solutions that we talked about here and it makes me optimistic that, that this industry can really uh cut its carbon footprint. Yeah. Thank you so much. Thank you very much.

Jean-Pascal Tricoire, Chairman, Schneider Electric In Conversation With Claire Zillman, Fortune

Innovation Forum 2024: The Green Tech Paradox

Brainstorm Innovation Forum 2024: The Green Tech Paradox

So you're Chair of Schneider Electric now, but I wanna go, you were CEO before um from 22,006 to 2023. And the company under during your tenure just had really extraordinary growth. And I'm wondering if you can kind of just briefly walk through some of the pillars of that growth that really built Schneider into this sort of green, the green giant that it is today. Well, first, it's great to be with you. Uh Good evening to all. Uh it's a late session. We'll try to keep it animated. But when you speak about Schneider, many people don't know us. So as a disclaimer, we don't do elevators because people confuse us with Schindler. Normally Schneider is really a world leader in the field of electrification. Um When you speak about the transformation we drove over the past 20 years, we had the intuition on the strong conviction that the world of energy was in a deadlock. So we had to re invent because on one side, you have to provide energy to many more people in the world. On the other side already 20 years ago, people were starting to speak about carbon emission and climate change. Um personally had lived in China in the nineties and I was in emerging countries of which Africa and you soon realize that energy is your passport to decent life. But at the same time, energy is the first source of pollution, of disruption and everything. So we embarked 20 years ago to be championing sustainability thanks to technologies and we bet on two technologies mainly one is digitization and it seems obvious today. But at that time, nobody was speaking about IOS internet of things. So it was the episode two of digitization, bringing internet to machines so that we would be much more efficient in everything we do. On. The second one was electrification as a factor of decarbonization because the only way to eliminate carbon is to take out combustion and the only way to take out combustion is to refer to or to recur to clean electricity. So electrification digitization that brings we became partner of our customers in the field of sustainability. We are the partner today of 40% of the fortune 500 companies in establishing a goal driving solution. Or um the last bet or the other bet we took is to say that probably the biggest acceleration that would happen on those transitions would come in countries which have no legacy. And therefore we re embarked in new economies today. If you look 20 years after fast forward, we multiply by four, the size of the company, we multiply by 10 in Asia and in new economies, we multiply by five in North America. And the company has seen its market cap being multiplied by 12, but just by having 20 years before on much earlier than probably others, a different view of energy which is efficiency first, decarbonization, first on term to sustainability. And one of the things that, that Schneider does that I think is interesting is, you know, retrofitting buildings to be much more energy efficient through the digitization automation electrification. When we talk about a building like this, the hotel we're in now, can you just give us a sense of what Schneider can do to make this building more efficient? Well, number one, connect everything. So going to so saying, making sure that once everything is connected, the building adapts to what the people do on most of the buildings too, they don't do that. So when the room is empty, making sure that there is no energy or consumption and so on. Number three, apply on a niche software A I for to optimize everything the the life cycle of the building. So optimize every phase from design to build, to operation, to maintenance, making sure that everything is optimizing your building, heating, water, everything and and manage your company, not what we used to do before, which is building by building room by room, but making sure that you can manage your company on a holistic basis and we do that here with number of reputable company. I won't say I won't cite all of them, but we have done a digital repository for Swire from Han Nung and from other, other companies. And you were really an early adopter of this. Um uh So the philosophy that's really popular with CEO S now that you're gonna center your management strategy around the planet and around society. And I'm curious sort of, what about your personal background and experience really led you to sort of take for, for that approach to sort of be on your radar so early. Look, there is first the fact that climate change, right is probably one of the biggest challenges of of our generation and it has different expression. We speak about climate change as a as a big idea, but it can be droughts, it can be water shortages, it can lead to typhoons here in Hong Kong and major disasters. So it has already strong social and economic consequences. Then when you look at what we do, which is energy management, it's not complicated. Climate change is 80% due to carbon emissions and carbon emissions are 80% due to the way we use and produce energy. So when you speak about climate change, normally media and government, they all speak about generation like renewable, nuclear coal gas and things. But when you think about it in the story of humanity, energy transitions to something which is net zero never happens through the through the supply, there won't be more electric cars because there is more electricity. Actually, there is not more electricity. As we speak, there would be more electric cars because California and China have started a movement that goes very strong in the direction of electric cars. And with that in 10 or 20 years, we are going to decarbonize transportation which is 30% of carbon carbon emissions in the world. So we saw that our mission was to enable this transition of the demand, making sure that every building would go to net zero, every industry would go to net zero, every city would go to net zero on making sure so and we are the biggest supplier of energy to data centers that we would put together the digital infrastructure, not only for us to live in the digital age, but to make sure that everything would be connected and everything could be optimized. It took some time to be understood. But then the world keep from turn and then we had a lot of momentum on the route of advance on our competition on V CS. What created the dynamics I was describing before? And what about the buy? I mean, you you undertake this big mission. What was the response like within the company within your board among shareholders? Um When you sort of launched this big push towards sustainability, was there push back? Or I have to say I put from day 1, 2003, I became CEO of the company on Sun CEO. Day one, I put slides about sustainability in each and every of my presentation. I can say that for investors for 15 years, nobody was caring till there was 2015, the cop 21 but more important in 2019, um some of our investors starting with Black Rock Clar started to send letters saying we all view account. We we all do accountable UC OS, not only on the financials, but on the all impact you have on your environment and then it became mainstream, right? So I'm gonna give a few examples for the people who could doubt of that. The first one I from the origin, we belong to the United Global Compact. We are part of the because Global Compact gives you a sort of compass to all the companies who want to work together in that direction. Last year, another 3000 companies joined the Global Compact at the time when people could speak about the backlash against cag. But you see that movement, you've got 3000 companies who've signed to be Net zero on being certified through S BT. Those 3000 companies are tagging along or taking along thousands of other companies who are their suppliers on scope three and we are part, of course, we are company 59 on, on that group of companies. So the movement is taking place and it's a sort of snowboarding because I take Schneider 99% of our footprint is with our ecosystem. So when we took that commitment to be net zero by 2050 then we are taking along our suppliers, 1000 suppliers, we bring 100 million tons of saving to our customers. We help the communities to get access for the first time to green energy. 50 million people who didn't have access to energy, get access to energy. Thanks to what we do and investors react positively to that. So last year we are one of the top three companies in which the ESG fund are investing. So that has driven a lot of rating or positive rating for Schneider. And you've seen the share price going up very fast. So when you do that, number one, you need to align the purpose, the strategy, the mission of your company with EG and to do it very rigorously. Number two, you need to have the right governance. So for us, we have a committee at the board, we have a representative at the executive committee and we have a stakeholder committee which challenges the decision of the board, taking other stakeholders point of view. Number three, you need to embark your own ecosystem, customers, suppliers, employees shareholders, they have to, yeah, they have to be consistent with what you have described. Number four, your culture and therefore the people you choose. But when you live like me a community of 150,000 people in 100 countries. It's not only good to have one very clear purpose which is aligned on something positive because sustainable means that what you do is sustainable by definition. But it's also super important that people know how to do things. Um eeg allows you to define ethical, ecological, social sort of standards that you want to adhere to. So all of this was actually demanding at the beginning needed a lot of explanation. But suddenly the people who join you are people who believe in those things that mean your company in the right tail winds because what's sustainable actually brings a lot of growth. And one thing if you are the CEO is to derisk your company. So making sure that you have strong standards in terms of CG is bringing is decreasing, noticeably all levels of risk in the company. So more opportunities, less risk that brings normally good results. And you mentioned cop and you were there again this year. Um And when you were there, you, you um you shared this sort of remarkable stat or at least I find it remarkable that 70% of carbon emissions today can be eliminated with today's technology. And I I find that very reassuring actually that we don't need some, you know, huge breakthrough. We have some of the tools um to do that to, to really um bring down emissions today. But my question is So, so what's the hold up? You know, why aren't we making more progress or more rapid progress on cutting emissions? I think, because human beings are very, very slow to embrace change. Uh Think about it. I had my first internet connection when I was living in China in 9495. And it took another 10 years to get Facebook and probably another 12 or 15 years to get tuba and all of this could have been possible much earlier, not completely because you needed the smartphone as the as the other innovation to to enable that. Um Let's let's look at at the reality today. If you start by saying that the real transition is starting with a demand. I mean, if your building is net zero, then you put no pressure on the supply or if your plant is not zero, like we help Takida in Singapore to be 15% energy positive in a place which is constrained in terms of energy. Then suddenly your manufacturing is becoming positive in uh in Singapore and you can apply that to uh uh many, many things. But the technologies which allow us now to do that are completely different from the one that we used even 10 years ago. Smart buildings. Everybody is speaking about small buildings, you go to Europe and the US, less than 10% of the buildings are smart and buildings are representing 37% of energy consumption on carbon emissions. So before speaking about moonshots and doing whatever nuclear fusion and those kind of things, let's make sure that all of the buildings are connected and they are very energy efficient and they can load and store energy when energy is cheap and green when the solar panels are working on the, when the windmills are pro producing energy. Um I look at the buildings around me, even here in Hong Kong, there is not much solar panel and there is a lot of sun which is available. So when you speak to the construction industry and you spoke about the building, so I stick here or I stay here. Um When, when you speak about efficiency, many people will speak about windows and roofing and this is very expensive and this takes a lot of money and a lot of time um you apply digital to most of the buildings, you're going to get the same result for 1/10 of the cost and 1/10 of the time. Um And it's exactly the same thing as with the internet. Today. People have not yet integrated the capability. Uh And with that on the top of it, once you have digitized, you can connect to the grid, the smart grid. And we are doing for instance in Hong Kong, the grid smart with C LP and you can make sure that your buildings on your homes are loading energy when it's cheap and green. So all of this has barely started. But this is very exciting for the next years to come. So what I'm saying is that before thinking about the big revolution that just deploy what we have because time time counts, right? Carbon is not, it's it's it's integrated, a ton of carbon that we save today has 10 times more value than a ton of carbon we save in 10 years time. So time is really important. Great. Well, we will leave it there. Thank you so much for being with us and for giving us some actionable steps as we look to cut emissions and hopefully have a greener future, go digital and go electric. Ok. Thank you. Thank you. Thanks so much.

Clair

Clair in Fortune Rankings

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