The Future of Our Planet Needs More Than Solutions. It Needs Systems. 

Why fashion belongs in the climate conversation, why we’re building sustainability infrastructure from Africa, and what our Opus nomination means to me. 

When people hear the words fashion technology, I think they often imagine something quite glamorous. Virtual fitting rooms, AI-powered styling, digital wardrobes, new ways to shop, new ways to sell, and increasingly sophisticated ways to make the consumer experience more convenient. And listen, I love fashion. I love the creativity of it, the storytelling, the way a garment can communicate something about who we are before we’ve said a single word. There’s a reason I chose to spend my life working in this industry. 

But when I tell people that OneThread is building fashion technology, and then explain that our work belongs in conversations about climate, environmental resilience and the future of our planet, I sometimes get the sense that people are trying to connect two things that don’t naturally belong together. 

What does fashion have to do with climate change? 

Quite a lot, actually. 

Fashion is connected to agriculture, water, energy, manufacturing, international trade, chemical processing, transportation and waste. The industry’s environmental footprint stretches from the cultivation and extraction of raw materials to the production, use and eventual disposal of garments. Textile production can involve significant resource consumption, chemical pollution and greenhouse gas emissions, while the growing volume of discarded clothing creates further environmental pressures. 

And that’s before we begin discussing the industry’s social impacts. Labour exploitation, unsafe working conditions, child labour risks, inequalities within global supply chains and the ways fashion shapes our relationships with our bodies are all part of a much larger conversation about the systems through which clothing is produced and consumed. 

I’ve been making this argument for years: if you want to understand how some of the world’s most complicated economic, social and environmental problems intersect, fashion is an extraordinarily revealing place to begin. 

It was never an arbitrary starting point for me. 

I chose fashion because I understood how much of the world was connected to it. And because I believed that if we could develop better ways of understanding and improving the systems behind what we wear, the implications could extend well beyond clothing. 

We Have to Understand the Problem Before We Can Solve It 

Years ago in therapy, I learned about a concept called radical acceptance. I absolutely hated it at the time. The idea that I needed to accept something I didn’t like, something I wanted to change, felt almost counterintuitive. Why would I accept something that I was actively trying to make better? 

The older I get, the more I understand what I was being taught. 

Acceptance doesn’t necessarily mean approval. It means recognising what is actually happening rather than what we wish were happening. You cannot meaningfully address a problem if you are unwilling, or unable, to recognise the problem in the first place. 

I’ve come to think about sustainability in much the same way. 

We are very good at identifying visible symptoms and developing solutions around them. A business changes its packaging. A designer introduces recycled material. A manufacturer installs more efficient equipment. These can be meaningful interventions, and I don’t want to diminish the work involved in making them happen. 

But sustainability is much bigger than any single material, product or operational decision. 

What happens if a brand switches to a lower-impact fabric but has no understanding of its labour conditions? What happens if a manufacturer introduces an energy-efficiency programme but has no reliable way to establish its baseline consumption or measure whether the intervention worked? What happens if a business makes genuinely responsible sourcing decisions but cannot trace its materials sufficiently to substantiate the claims it makes about them? 

We can make improvements in one area while remaining largely unaware of what’s happening elsewhere. Sometimes we’re addressing the symptoms of a much larger problem without understanding the system producing them. 

That’s one of the reasons OneThread’s sustainability framework examines ten interconnected pillars, including materials and sourcing, labour ethics, environmental impact, circularity, transparency, cultural stewardship and Ubuntu-driven shared value. We wanted a way to examine sustainability as something embedded throughout a business rather than something confined to its environmental marketing.

And increasingly, I’ve realised that the problem isn’t always a lack of willingness to improve. Sometimes businesses don’t have the infrastructure to understand where they currently stand, what they need to change or whether their interventions are achieving the outcomes they intended. 

We talk about sustainability targets, climate commitments and responsible production. But how do we establish whether those commitments are translating into meaningful change? 

How do we know? 

Sometimes the Innovation Is the Infrastructure 

Recently, we pitched OneThreadin a conversation focused on climate adaptation and resilience. It’s the kind of conversation I actively pursue, even though I know that fashion technology isn’t necessarily the first thing people expect to encounter in that space. 

And I think that’s part of a much larger problem with how we imagine innovation. 

When we think about climate solutions, we often think about the technologies that directly address an environmental challenge: renewable energy, water conservation, waste recovery, alternative materials or more efficient production methods. We need those innovations. We need people developing new technologies, testing new approaches and finding better ways to produce the things our societies depend on. 

But those solutions also need systems around them. 

A manufacturer introducing more efficient machinery needs a way to understand whether energy consumption has actually decreased. A fashion brand investing in more responsible materials needs information about where those materials came from and how they were produced. A business implementing a waste-reduction programme needs to understand what waste it was generating in the first place, what changed and whether those changes can be sustained. 

Without reliable information, even promising interventions can become difficult to evaluate, improve or replicate. 

That’s the space OneThread is working in. 

We’re building sustainability intelligence and infrastructure that helps businesses understand their existing practices, identify gaps, organise their records and substantiate their sustainability claims. Through our assessment framework, evidence systems and developing traceability infrastructure, we’re working toward making sustainability information more visible, usable and verifiable. 

We aren’t claiming that documenting a problem automatically solves it. Measuring emissions doesn’t reduce them on its own, and having a traceability system doesn’t automatically make a supply chain responsible. 

But if we want to know whether something is improving, we need a credible understanding of where we started and what has changed. 

We need to be able to distinguish between an intention, an activity and a demonstrated outcome. 

And we need to make that information useful to the people who can actually do something with it. 

The more I’ve worked on OneThread, the more I’ve come to appreciate that some of the most consequential technologies aren’t necessarily the ones consumers interact with directly. They’re the systems that make other activities possible, that connect fragmented information, support better decisions and allow improvements to be demonstrated rather than simply promised. 

Fashion was where we learned to recognise the problem. It doesn’t have to be the boundary of the infrastructure we’re building. 

Why We’re Building From Africa 

OneThread is being built from Africa because this is home, but also because I believe this continent has an enormous amount to contribute to how the world understands sustainability. 

Too often, conversations about sustainability infrastructure begin with systems designed elsewhere and then ask how African businesses can be brought into them. We discuss compliance, market access and the documentation businesses will need to satisfy international expectations, but spend less time asking what the realities of African production might teach us about designing those systems in the first place. 

Across the continent, businesses operate within very different economic and infrastructural conditions. Some work through highly formalised supply chains; others rely on long-standing community relationships, small-scale production networks and systems of knowledge that have never been translated into the documentation formats expected by international institutions. 

Repair, reuse, resourcefulness, local production knowledge and shared economic practices are already part of how many businesses operate. None of those practices should be romanticised or automatically described as sustainable simply because they are traditional or local. Their actual impacts still need to be examined. 

But neither should they become invisible simply because they don’t fit neatly into a system developed for a different operating environment.  

I’ve spent six years researching African sustainability systems, and one of the things that continues to shape my work is the understanding that the absence of formal documentation doesn’t necessarily mean the absence of meaningful practice. 

We need ways to recognise what businesses are already doing, evaluate those practices rigorously and help them build the infrastructure to demonstrate their work. We also need to identify where existing practices fall short, where resources are being wasted and where change is genuinely necessary. 

That’s why we say, “Sustainable by tradition. Provable by data.” 

It’s an invitation to examine what already exists, strengthen what works and create the evidence needed to support credible claims. The standard of proof shouldn’t become less rigorous because a business is African. The pathway to producing that proof should be capable of understanding the business’s reality. 

And I believe that when we build systems with those realities in mind, we can create infrastructure that is useful far beyond the continent. 

Six Years of Believing in Something 

I want to talk about what this nomination means to me, because I don’t think I can write about the future we’re building without acknowledging what it has taken to get here. 

OneThread has been shortlisted in the Future of Our Planet category of the Opus Early-Stage Entrepreneur of the Year awards. 

We’re still a very young company. I’ve been working on the research and ideas behind OneThread for six years, but the platform and business as they exist today have only really begun taking shape over the past several months. 

Sometimes I have to remind myself of that. 

As a founder, one of the things I’ve tried to teach myself is to chase no’s. To apply for the opportunity, send the email, make the introduction, pitch the idea and stop allowing the possibility of rejection to determine whether I try. 

It’s an important lesson, especially when you’re building something that people don’t immediately understand. 

The problem is that when you spend enough time chasing no’s, you can become very good at receiving them. And eventually, if you’re not careful, you can get so accustomed to rejection that you almost stop expecting a yes. Or even a maybe. 

I’ve had moments like that recently. More than I’d like to admit. 

I think people sometimes imagine that founders with big ideas must have an extraordinary amount of confidence. And perhaps some do. I’ve always been a girl with a big imagination, and I’ve never been particularly good at thinking small. But nobody spends more time questioning whether I’m the right person to build OneThread than I do. 

I ask myself whether I’m capable of doing what I’ve set out to do, whether I’m making the right decisions, whether I’ll be able to see the vision through. I’ve learned an enormous amount about building a company, managing resources, developing technology and navigating the realities of entrepreneurship while raising two humans at the same time. I’m proud of how far we’ve managed to come with the resources we’ve had, and I’m even more excited about what we can build with everything we’ve learned. 

But learning doesn’t eliminate the uncertainty. 

And sometimes, in the middle of all that uncertainty, something happens that reminds you that other people can see what you’ve been trying to build. 

That’s what this nomination has felt like. 

Not because an award determines whether OneThread is valuable, or because being shortlisted means we’ve already achieved the impact we’re working toward. We still have a tremendous amount of work ahead of us. 

But because somebody looked at this very young company, at the problem we’re trying to solve and the future we’re imagining, and saw something worth recognising. 

And then people started voting. 

Friends began sharing our nomination. People sent screenshots of their votes. Others encouraged their communities to support us. People took a moment out of their day to participate in something that means a great deal to a small team building a very big idea. 

I’ve been genuinely overwhelmed by that generosity. 

I don’t think recognition makes the difficult parts of entrepreneurship disappear. But sometimes, when you’ve been working so hard to keep moving forward, it gives you a moment to look around and realise that you aren’t the only person who believes the work is worth doing. 

And I needed that moment. 

The Future We’re Building 

I don’t believe the future of our planet will be secured by any single technology, industry or organisation. The challenges we’re facing are too interconnected, and the work required is far too extensive. 

We’re going to need extraordinary innovations that change how we produce energy, grow food, manufacture products, manage resources and respond to environmental change. 

We’re also going to need the infrastructure that allows those innovations to be understood, implemented, evaluated and improved. 

We need businesses that can recognise their impacts and take responsibility for them. We need systems that make environmental information more accessible and credible. We need sustainability to become part of how organisations operate, rather than something they try to reconstruct when a customer, investor or regulator asks for proof. 

And we need the people building those systems to understand the communities, industries and environments they’re designing for. 

That’s the future OneThread is working toward. 

We’re starting with fashion because fashion gives us an extraordinary opportunity to examine how environmental, social, cultural and economic systems intersect. We’re building from Africa because we believe the continent should help shape the infrastructure through which sustainability is understood and demonstrated. 

And we’re doing it because I believe that meaningful progress requires more than good intentions or exciting new solutions. It requires the ability to understand what is happening, recognise what needs to change and establish whether the changes we make are actually working. 

Six years ago, this was an idea I couldn’t stop thinking about. Today, it’s a company with a team, a platform, customers and a growing community of people who believe in what we’re building. 

We’re still early. We’re still learning. And we have a long way to go. 

But we’re building. 

And right now, that’s something I’m incredibly proud of. 

A Small Ask, and a Very Big Thank You 

OneThread has been shortlisted for the Opus Early-Stage Entrepreneur of the Year awards in the Future of Our Planet category, and we’re currently in the top 25% of our category. 

If you believe the future of sustainability needs better systems for understanding, measuring, and demonstrating progress, we’d be grateful for your vote. 

Voting is free, and every vote supports a young African company building sustainability infrastructure for a better future. 

Vote for OneThread: https://theeasies.com/vote?n=nyaniso-burris 

To everyone who has already voted, shared our nomination or encouraged somebody else to support us: thank you. Truly. 

You’ve made a very big dream feel a little less lonely. 

Nyani 

— Founder & CEO, OneThread Africa 

Images by www.imprintza.com

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