We help brands and suppliers to understand and onboard carbon related data
Onlygood, founded in 2022, empowers businesses to drive real sustainability through data-driven solutions. Focused on simplifying carbon accounting and ESG reporting, Onlygood helps companies measure, manage, and reduce their environmental impact. Its smart platform, tailored for the apparel sector, offers carbon accounting, ESG reporting, product life cycle assessment, supply chain decarbonisation, and traceability. Speaking to Fibre2Fashion, Co-founder Vivek Mehra shares insights into how Onlygood is bridging critical ESG data gaps, helping brands achieve sustainability at scale, and enabling fashion and textile companies to prepare for a future where traceability, transparency, and verified impact are business essentials.
How has the fashion industry’s approach to ESG evolved in recent years, especially with the rise of stricter regulations and conscious consumers?
The fashion industry is moving from being simply aware to becoming conscious of their responsibility towards sustainability. Their initiatives and technology adoption is more targeted. Many have established net zero goals and with Onlygood’s help are onboarding their suppliers as well to create greener ecosystems.
With increasing pressure from consumers and regulators, how do you see ESG data becoming a differentiator for apparel brands in the next 3–5 years?
In addition to regulatory pressure, apparel brands are now sensitive to consumer tastes that are moving visibly towards sustainable fashion. Brands and suppliers need to provide data-backed assurance to both their customers and regulators that they have a climate strategy, and net zero targets. They need to advertise and demonstrate their sustainability practices, use of renewable energy sources, as well as the use of alternate materials. Data is the key to any such advertising or compliance. Without verified data, brand loyalty will fade, and their businesses will be at risk of non-compliance related penalties.
What are some of the most common challenges apparel companies face when trying to implement ESG frameworks across their supply chains?
The biggest challenge for firms is to avoid an adhoc implementation of sustainability initiatives. The leadership first needs to develop a strategic mindset, assess what the company is currently doing, understand its compliance obligations and create a culture that takes ownership of improving ESG metrics.
Onlygood focuses on empowering fashion and textile brands to meet ESG goals—what inspired you to build a data-driven platform specifically for this industry?
Both Rajeev (Sinha) and I (Vivek Mehra) had been participating in sustainability initiatives at a personal level over many years and Rajeev ran a very successful apparel brand for many years. We realised that while fashion brands have been reporting sustainability measures like the Higg Index and taking certifications such as GOTS (Organic cotton), etc., there still was a huge gap in measuring carbon emissions across the supply chain, as well as ensuring circularity of apparel. We realised that piecemeal sustainability initiatives would never be enough to save the planet unless we helped businesses embrace sustainability at scale and help them accelerate their sustainability journeys. So, we designed and built the Onlygood technology platform to address the collation and analysis of supplier carbon emissions. The journey since 2022 has been extremely rewarding and we have saved hundreds of thousands of tons of CO2 emissions across apparel and textile companies and helped them with compliance reporting.
How does Onlygood’s ESG software translate complex sustainability data into actionable insights for brands that may not have deep in-house expertise in ESG?
We help brands and suppliers to understand and onboard carbon related data. We also correlate emissions with production data to understand carbon intensity and score various facilities on ESG metrics. The analytics help identify hotspots and help determine decarbonisation pathways – including energy audits, solar intervention, waste management amongst others.
The concept of ‘Sustainability at Scale’ is compelling. Could you share a case where Onlygood helped an apparel making company significantly scale its environmental initiatives through your platform?
One of our clients is a key supplier to large European brands, Under the new EU regulatory regime, suppliers have to disclose month-on-month supplier carbon emissions and score higher on their global ESG reporting portal. We helped build data pipelines, including IoT device installation for energy meters to directly capture data, verify it and report overall emissions. The dashboard unified the emissions from all activities in a comprehensive GRI-based ESG report, including all facilities in India and overseas.
In your experience, what are some of the biggest ESG data gaps in the apparel industry today, and how does your platform help bridge those gaps?
The biggest data gaps arise from incomplete and often erroneous data provided by suppliers. If the data is entered via Excel, it is prone to errors and is often neither verified nor supported by documentation. The Onlygood platform uses AI/Computer vision, IoT devices, and ERP integration to automate data collection from across the supply chain. The platform follows the ISO14064 process to ensure data veracity and auditability for assurance.
Customising ESG software for each client sounds intensive. How does Onlygood tailor its tools to the specific needs of diverse apparel businesses?
The Onlygood platform offers configurable dashboards that automate and tailor workflows, analytics and reporting, based on the organisation design of our clients. We onboard suppliers across the globe and create data pipelines to ensure transparency in the supply chain with regard to ESG metrics.
How does Onlygood integrate with existing systems (like ERP or supply chain platforms) that apparel companies may already be using?
Onlygood’s platform is highly modular and has an API (Application Programming Interface) -driven design. This allows for easy integration and interoperability with any existing ERP or other system (such as Health & Safety) in the enterprise.
In your view, what role does technology—particularly data analytics and AI—play in transforming sustainability from a marketing narrative into a measurable operational strategy?
Without AI, analytics and data automation, continuous monitoring of carbon and other ESG metrics is impossible – especially across global supply chains where data is fragmented and siloed. Excel and survey-based approach cannot scale unless there are data pipelines and unified, standardised data repositories that can provide the auditability needed for regulatory compliance.
What role does predictive analytics or AI play in helping brands not just measure, but anticipate and prevent sustainability challenges?
Like in financial modelling, carbon data can be used to create AI-based ‘what-if’ scenarios for brands to see how well they are tracking against their stated carbon reduction goals. They can make business decisions on adjusting their decarbonisation pathways, where to set up new plants, or where to intervene with renewables.
You talk about moving ‘From Insight to Action’—what mechanisms within your platform help translate ESG reporting into real-world operational changes?
ESG reporting with Onlygood provides deep insights into operational ESG metrics, correlations with production data, and highlights divergence from stated carbon net zero goals. This allows decision-makers to adjust supply chains, identify areas where renewable energy sources can applied, and pre-empt compliance bottlenecks with regard to data.
With increasing demand for supply chain transparency, how are fashion and textile companies adapting to ensure traceability from raw material to finished product?
They are certainly more aware and bringing in technology solutions like the Onlygood platform not just within the enterprise, but also to their suppliers. This helps to share and collaborate on net zero goals across the supply chain.
Looking ahead, what’s next for Onlygood? Are there any innovations or features on the roadmap that you believe could further revolutionise ESG in fashion?
The Onlygood platform continuously releases new features every month which are available to all of our subscribing clients. These include analytics and reporting, as well as updates on global regulatory frameworks to enable brands to prepare for compliance well in advance.
How do you see the intersection of sustainability, digital transformation, and profitability shaping the future of the textile industry?
Textile industry supply chains span a large spectrum – some are highly mechanised, while others are manual intensive and low-scale. They are at an inflection point where customer expectations and regulatory pressure are aligning to promote sustainability as a strategic imperative. All can benefit from implementing technology to collect and share data and bring transparency to the production processes. This will help identify and reduce wastage of energy, water, and encourage transition to alternate materials and renewable energy.
