‘We didn’t get into it because it was popular’: Worldly’s CSO in conversation with SGIE

The news landed on the SGIE desk on May 4: Worldly announced the acquisition of Bendi Software, a UK-based supply chain mapping company designed to see into parts of the value chain that most brands have never examined. Tier 2. Tier 3. The rubber gaskets and cable housings, as Schaffer puts it: the components whose origins most sourcing teams could not name if asked.

It was the company’s second acquisition in seven months. The first, the acquisition of chemical compliance platform GoBlu last October, had already expanded Worldly’s reach from environmental performance data into chemical safety. It also aligned the platform with frameworks such as the Zero Discharge of Hazardous Chemicals (ZDHC) programme and OEKO-TEX.

The Bendi deal went further, adding labor risk scoring, multi-tier mapping and AI-assisted assessment automation. Together, the two acquisitions send a clear message: Worldly is assembling what it aims to be the most comprehensive sustainability data network in consumer goods, one layer at a time.

It had been exactly one year since SGIE first covered the company in depth. Much had happened in the interim.

The year the platform accelerated

When SGIE spoke with Worldly in May 2025, the company was explaining itself to a sporting goods audience that was still learning what the Higg Index was and why it mattered. The platform had more than 40,000 brands, retailers and manufacturers on its books. The newly launched Product Impact Calculator was calculating Scope 3 emissions at the product level, using primary supplier data rather than spend-based estimates. Since launch, more than 1 billion units have been connected to purchase orders through the tool.

The story, for us, was about education. 
The story now is about something way deeper for the sporting goods industry.

In December 2025, Worldly formalized a strategic partnership with the World Federation of the Sporting Goods Industry (WFSGI), reflecting a belief that the sporting goods sector was ready to move from awareness to adoption. In February, the Product Impact Calculator expanded from 40 product categories to more than 260, covering sporting goods, footwear, furniture and home goods — broad enough for multi-category retailers now facing mandatory Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive (CSRD) disclosure. In April, Worldly joined the Green Sports Alliance (GSA), extending its platform to professional sports teams, collegiate athletic programs and event venues.

Then came Bendi. 

Schaffer, when asked about the pace, almost laughs. “It’s not fast enough,” he says. Then, after a beat: “It’s actually slower than the original vision.”

“A beautiful and pure thing”. And a technology issue.

To understand what Worldly is, you have to go back more than 15 years. Not to the company’s founding in 2019, but to the rooms where the problem was first understood.

James Schaffer was in those rooms. Hotel basements, he calls them. Weird restaurants. Meetings between people who would not normally meet: brands and their competitors, civil society organizations and factory owners, practitioners and NGO experts. The subject was an industry in trouble, one whose labor conditions and environmental footprint had become a source of genuine scandal. The shared goal was to build a common methodology for measuring and improving performance across the supply chain.

“The purity of creation was really beautiful,” Schaffer says. “People really dropping their guards competitively.”

What emerged was the Higg Index, developed under what was then the Sustainable Apparel Coalition (SAC), now known as Cascale. The original theory of change was elegant: if you measure, you will improve. Tens of thousands of factories completing standardized assessments. Brands using the same scoring logic. A shared vocabulary for what better actually looks like.

The problem was scale. Delivering a shared methodology to 100,000 or a million nodes is not simply a civil society challenge. It is a technology challenge. A capitalization challenge. By around 2016, the strain was acute: the technology was breaking, and the nonprofit business model was not generating the investment needed to fix it.

Schaffer became one of the principal architects of a solution. The conclusion was that, alongside the methodology, the industry had to focus on delivery. Keep the mission and collective governance inside the civil society organization. Move the technology, capitalization and commercial scale into a separate entity. In 2019, Worldly was incorporated as a public benefit corporation — for-profit in structure, mission-defined in purpose.

“That’s why we conceived of Worldly,” Schaffer says. “The entire industry was saying we actually have to move faster.”

Mission and money: the question that needs an answer

Worldly now has close to 200 employees and is roughly halfway to its stated goal of 100,000 platform users. It is backed by impact investors – Titan Grove, led by Jeffrey Tannenbaum, whose principal business achievement was building the largest solar power utility in the United States; and Galvanize, formerly led by Tom Steyer, one of the most prominent climate-focused investors in America, who stepped down last November to run for Governor of California. The funding is real, the ambitions are large, and the acquisitions are coming at speed.

Which raises a question that the sustainability sector does not always want to ask directly: is there a contradiction between a mission-driven culture and the logic of venture capital?

“I really like this question,” Schaffer says when I put to him. His answer does not arrive as a press-release defense. It arrives as a cultural description.

Nearly all of Worldly’s 200 employees come from mission-driven backgrounds: NGOs, civil society organizations, responsible sourcing departments. Schaffer himself spent 15 years running a consultancy that worked exclusively with mission-aligned organizations before joining. Adele Stafford, the company’s Chief Growth Officer, has a similar background. So does almost everyone else on the leadership team, he says, if you check their LinkedIn profiles.

“We have good funding,” Schaffer acknowledges. “We could have gone and hired a bunch of Silicon Valley technologists. But we didn’t.”

The resolution to the apparent contradiction, he argues, lies in investor selection. “I think our investors would describe themselves as impact investors,” he says. This is not ESG as a marketing overlay. It is a shared operating philosophy: one that has, so far, held.

What 50,000 customers actually teach you

The dataset Worldly has accumulated is, by any standard, remarkable. Roughly 50,000 companies feeding primary data year over year: energy use, water consumption, chemical management, labor conditions, emissions, waste. No financial proxy. No modeled estimates. Actual factory-level numbers.

And what that data says, according to Schaffer, is not always what the industry wants to hear.

The attention paid to carbon reduction - real, widespread, and increasingly well-funded - has come at the expense of attention to water scarcity. “We still talk about water scarcity as if it’s something over there,” Schaffer says. “Something we’ll think about in 10 years.” The data tells a different story: major water basins are under acute and growing pressure, and the problem is more urgent than the industry’s current investment levels reflect.

The second finding is structural. The environmental impact intensity at Tier 2 - the mills, dye houses, and chemical processing facilities where fabrics are treated and finished - far exceeds what most brands are measuring or managing. Brands are comfortable with their Tier 1 suppliers, where long-term commercial relationships are in place. But Tier 1 is not where most of the impact is.

“By a huge factor,” Schaffer says, “the impacts are upstream.”

Bendi’s Pathfinder product was built to close this gap, mapping supplier relationships to Tier 2, Tier 3 and beyond without requiring direct supplier participation. For sporting goods specifically, where hard-lines categories involve deep Tier 1 relationships but near-total opacity below that, the application is direct.

One more thing the data does not support: the idea that poor performance justifies walking away from a supplier. Schaffer is careful on this point. A sourcing officer cannot simply wake up and switch factories: there is no pool of better-performing suppliers waiting with spare capacity.

“The more likely and healthy outcome,” he says, “is: how do we improve together?”

The European question, and the line Worldly will not cross

Who is writing is based in Berlin and has developed a particularly European sensitivity to regulation (obsession?). The Corporate Sustainability Due Diligence Directive (CSDDD) will require the largest EU-operating companies to identify and address human rights and environmental impacts across their chains of activity. The Digital Product Passport (DPP) will phase in requirements for product-level environmental data through 2030. The CSRD is already live for large companies. It’s a lot.

The question for Worldly is how a US-based technology company, working at global scale, positions itself within a regulatory environment it did not design and cannot control.

Schaffer’s answer is unusually crisp. Worldly is an enabler of regulatory compliance. It is not a lobbying organization, not a standards body, not an advocacy platform. When a prominent European policy organization recently invited Worldly and other solution providers to join what was described as an advocacy group, Worldly declined.

“That is Cascale’s role,” Schaffer says. “And that is the role of other civil society organizations.”

The same discipline applies to the platform’s most sensitive data layer: labor conditions at facility level. Facility-level information about working hours, wages and safety conditions is exactly the category of personal data that the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) treats with the greatest care. Worldly’s answer, embedded in the platform design long before GDPR existed, is that factories own their data. Nothing is shared with a brand without that factory’s explicit, named consent. Even then, the receiving brand can only use the data internally. Worldly itself can only work with aggregated, anonymized trends — never identifiable individual or facility-level records.

“The factory has to own their data and all permissions flow from there,” Schaffer says. “That’s how we operate.”

The commitment that doesn’t bend

A year ago, the first SGIE interview with Worldly ended on a political question: what impact was the new US administration’s posture on sustainability having on sentiment among American companies? The answer then was measured: brands holding their breath, waiting to see what would actually be implemented. The same question, posed again one year on, receives a different answer.

“The commitment is deeper,” Schaffer says. “The urgency is greater.”

The real practitioners, he argues, did not get into sustainability because of a favorable regulatory climate or a sympathetic White House. They got into it for a reason that predates all of that. Schaffer changed his career - not once but twice - to work on this problem. “It had nothing to do with whether there was a regulatory framework in Europe or who was the president of the United States at the given time.”

For public companies navigating a political environment where ESG has become a contested term, he offers pragmatic advice: be savvy, and do it more quietly if you have to. But among the genuine practitioners — the people running the programs, managing supplier relationships and doing the actual work — neither the commitment nor the sense of urgency has softened.

If anything, the opposite.