Hello, everyone. Melissa Gonzalez from retail, we're fine. We're continuing with you, live, I have with me now Chris Jordan, who is the Founder and Chief architect of topo. So excited to dive in with him about what topo does and also the impact they're making in the fashion world and sustainability. So why don't you start with telling the audience a little bit more about topo? Yeah, absolutely. So topo is a blockchain company and we sit at the intersection of sustainability and really kind of deep technology and innovation. Fundamentally, we exist because there's not enough trust in the world as consumers. We don't know if we can trust product claims. We don't know if they're even true. We don't know if our morning coffee relied on slave labor or something like that. So really, we exist to bring more transparency, more verifiability to all the products that we consume every single day. So a big focus is fashion for you, right? And the fashion industry has been changing, right? Fashion week isn't what it used to be. The cycles of how clothing comes out has changed as that continues to evolve and shorten. What does that mean for the possibility of sustainability in the industry? Absolutely so there's a lot of different areas where I think, you know, the fashion industry is really changing its approach to ESG. But when we're talking about shorter time to delivery, shorter supply chains, what we're really getting to see is a lot less waste. I think the number is right now about 30% of textiles or apparel end up in landfills simply because by the time you place the order, 18 months later, the demand is different. The trends are different. As you get that down to weeks, you're reducing the waste. You're maybe even reducing the transportation costs your overhead and therefore like reducing carbon emissions, so that shortening translates to less waste, less carbon. And that's what we're excited about. Absolutely And then I mean, if you think about it with Instagram and all the social media tools, I mean, trends are just fleeting. They're evolving so quickly. So one of the measures you talked about was ESG. So can you tell us a little bit more about that, how you track it and what the possibilities are as brands get a better handle of understanding the impact of that? Yeah, absolutely. So kind of understand maybe first where topo sits in that overall ecosystem and really what we do is we act as an enabling technology kind of underpinning different platforms. So we're actually here at the show with one of our partners, Mercado labs, and it's our blockchain that underpins that. But then we'll work with IoT groups or other kind of ESG analytics companies to help secure their data. And what we've really found is different ESG metrics work better or worse for different industries or different products. We think it's kind of been a bit of a mistake to just try to come up with like one set of ESG standards and impose it on everyone because your supply chain is different than another company's supply chain. And so that contextualization is very important. And so that's kind of been our approach and saying, what's best here, what's best there and allowing everyone to optimize for whatever their vision of ESG is because really, there's no one right answer for that. One of the other things around this, I think it's great that you're working with with, with brands. I've noticed in some of the work we've done with brands, a lot of them are proactively creating councils like Gen Z councils. Yes, because they're really pushing the agenda forward that this is a topic we need to invest in and care about. What is your what are your thoughts around Gen Z and the impact that they're having with the industry? Absolutely so looking to Gen z, I guess the first thing I will say is going to take a little bit of credit back as a younger millennial. I think some of these trends kind of slowly start building, but they've really amplified and gone crazy these last few years. I think what it is people are starting to move their feet in the direction of ESG. People are voting more with their wallets and, you know, simply different things matter. A lot of the brands that existed on just their reputation or the name forever, and that was just kind of enough to coast through. That's being challenged. And it's a question of, you know, not only what are you producing, but what is the impact you're producing in the world. And I think we're really starting to see brands respond to that. I think we're starting to see just because there was so much supply chain and economic stress and weirdness around the pandemic. I think a lot of that is almost even causing a reset. And I think we're just going to see an amplification of that and kind of a slingshot effectively over the next few years to move that forward. I think we're going to see new brands. I think we're going to see brands built around, you know, equity and inclusion or built around the environment, and those are probably going to become the new differentiators. And that's going to be a bigger part. It's not just like on the side thing, like you have a company, it's got its identity. And just like there's this little ESG thing on the side, I think we're going to see that move more and more to the front and how people identify brands, they want to relate to them. They're trying to signal what's valuable to them, what's important to them, and I think brands are going to be responding to that. So what? Friends, do you think are kind of moving the industry forward, so we see a lot of turnover there? You know, in the sense that there's some bigger, older, more established brands that exist in that direction. But then also we see on the newer side. So Cotopaxi is a company that, you know, we've kind of as an ethical company, we've kind of been sourcing like all of our swag from there. I think, you know, Toms shoes going back a few years was really one of the leaders in this and especially that idea of building almost an entire identity around ESG positive impact. And so those are kind of some of the things that we're seeing, but it'll definitely be more and more being run on web3, right? What role do you see web three playing in the future of retail and looking at sustainability tokenization? Absolutely so when we think about web three, we really think of cutting off the places to hide. So obviously, as we're moving towards ESG. People talk about greenwashing. You know, we have to be worried. These claims are great. It's great that identities are shifting in that direction, but it's a lot less great if none of it's true. So we definitely kind of see blockchain and Web3 being used to make that data immutable and make sure that data is not being forged. But we also see, I think, web3 contributing to more identification with brands as we get into the metaverse and things like that. There's just more opportunity for brands and consumers to engage, hopefully in more authentic ways, ways that more closely aligned with Gen Z and these ESG forward values. So we definitely see it on the preventing greenwashing side, but also that consumer engagement. I know there was a metaverse talk actually earlier today as well, so I think that will be a big web three topic for retail over the next 18 months or so. No, absolutely. It's definitely a topic of conversation. So before we go because the audience isn't here live, if they were to go to your booth and the partnership you have downstairs with Mercado, what would we be experiencing? Yeah so what you'd be experiencing is really, you know, concrete demonstrations and real world value applications of how this technology can take fashion supply chains from 18 months to I think we're down with our partner public habit to 25 days. 25 days from an order being placed, the manufacturing process being started and it being delivered either to a retailer or a consumer. And I think those kind of concrete use cases is really important, because we're all super excited. We're all super visionary about what we can imagine the future being. But again, sometimes seeing it in action can be quite helpful and also quite motivating. It's nice to see when these visions are realized. No, absolutely. Well, I think there's a lot more ahead of us as far as commitments that brands can make to kind of live the promises that they're putting out into the world around sustainability. Absolutely And like you said, we're seeing more and more evidence that consumers are willing. They're putting their dollars behind those bets and they're expecting brands to do more than just put out a statement. They want to see action. Yes so the more that your platform helps brands understand what those possibilities are, the further, we will be to getting there. So thank you so much for spending time with us today and explaining more to the audience about Topol again, everybody. This is Chris Jorgen, founder and chief architect at Topol.
