While US corporations are quietly retreating from climate commitments under political pressure, one major fashion group just went the other direction.
Tapestry — the parent company of Coach, Kate Spade, and Stuart Weitzman — has signed a 10-year carbon removal partnership with Climeworks, the Swiss direct air capture company. It’s the first deal of its kind from a North American fashion company, and the length of the commitment stands out: a decade is an eternity in corporate sustainability, where most buyers sign one-year or three-year purchase agreements.
Why This Deal Is Notable
The CDR market runs on advance purchase agreements. Companies commit to buying future removal credits, which gives CDR startups the revenue certainty they need to build infrastructure. But most deals are short — 1-3 years — and rarely exceed a few thousand tons.
A 10-year agreement sends a different signal. It tells Climeworks (and the market) that at least one major corporation sees carbon removal as a permanent line item, not a PR cycle. For a company with $6.7 billion in annual revenue, that’s meaningful.
“This was an opportunity for us to establish a long-term partnership and send market signals that this type of innovation is needed,” Tapestry’s global head of ESG and sustainability, Logan Duran, told Vogue Business. “There are going to be emissions that we’re unable to address, and we need credible, long-term, durable carbon removal solutions to address them.”
The Bigger Picture: Fashion and Carbon Removal
Fashion has an enormous carbon footprint — the industry accounts for roughly 2-8% of global greenhouse gas emissions, depending on who’s counting and what they include. Most of that sits in Scope 3: supply chains, materials, shipping, consumer use.
Tapestry’s Climeworks deal covers Scope 1 emissions — the company’s own direct operations. That’s the smallest slice of the pie, and critics will rightly point out that buying DAC credits for your office heating while your supply chain emits thousands of times more isn’t exactly transformative.
But here’s the counterargument: someone has to go first. DAC is still expensive ($400-600/ton at Climeworks’ current scale), and early buyers are the ones who fund the cost curve down. The first solar panels were ruinously expensive too. They got cheap because utilities and governments were willing to overpay early.
The Political Context
This deal lands at a politically charged moment. The current US administration is systematically dismantling climate infrastructure — pulling funding from clean energy research, scrubbing climate data from government websites, and creating a hostile environment for companies with public sustainability commitments.
Some companies have responded by going quiet. Others — like Tapestry — are doubling down. The choice says something about which companies actually believe in what they’ve been promising.
What This Means for CDR Buyers
The deal adds to a growing list of corporate carbon removal purchases that signal long-term demand. Microsoft, Stripe, Frontier, and a handful of others have made large multi-year commitments. Fashion has been largely absent from that list until now.
If Tapestry’s competitors see this as a competitive move worth matching, it could unlock a new buyer segment for CDR. Fashion brands compete ferociously on brand values with younger consumers — and younger consumers care about climate.
Whether this translates to meaningful tons removed or stays as a Scope 1 footnote depends on what comes next. But as signals go, 10 years is a loud one.