COMMENTARY

Rethinking Retail Store Construction

In Asia and globally, sustainability consulting is becoming increasingly relevant to the construction industry, even more so with the luxury retail brand’s construction and renovations. Luxury retail brands are leading the demand for greener designs, construction, and operations from their retail stores and showrooms all the way to their corporate headquarters, logistic centers and even to their suppliers. Retailers have traditionally been perceived as wasteful and negligent of Environmental, Social and Governance (ESG) along with a lack of supply chain transparency. With the rise in global concern of climate change and social sustainability, retail brands have seen customers trust and loyalty grow with those retailers that are making sustainability a pillar of their business operations. As B2C businesses, retailers must now promise their global consumers that their corporate sustainability agenda is making a measurable difference and go way beyond small steps and haphazard ways of “green-washing”.

LEED’s many benefits to a brand. LEED is world’s most widely used green building design and construction standard. Available for virtually all building project types, LEED provides a framework that project teams can apply to create healthy, highly efficient, and cost-saving green buildings.

Sustainability Goes Beyond The Supply Chain
In recent years, retailers have begun to understand that while a product’s life-time is often short-lived, a new building’s life-time is long-lived and has many direct impacts on energy demand, water consumption, air quality, health of tenants and construction materials. Many global luxury retail brands are applying green building standards such as the internationally-recognized LEED Certification, with more and more developing their own sustainability standards that cover not only operations, but also construction and material use across their entire brand portfolio. These are exciting times as instead of brands focusing on short term product supply chain solutions, green retail construction and operations, brands are focused on creating long term impacts through education, creating core cultural changes to lead them into the future.


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