Raw materials, traceability, governance, community: Inditex's sustainability spans very different territories, but inside the company that value wasn't always felt. Bold Futures was created to change that — an internal design and communication strategy built so that sustainability initiatives would stop living in isolation and become known, in one shared language and one set of standards, across every department in the company.
Inditex
Fashion
Retail
Sustainability
A lot was happening inside the sustainability department, but little of it made it through the door. Information travelled hidden among acronyms, KPIs and figures that only the experts could decode, and it got lost along the way: few people had any real contact with that high-level information, and vice versa. Without anyone realising, the rest of the team was left out of a story that was theirs too.
And what isn’t understood, isn’t shared. Our job was to turn all that knowledge into something clear, close and purposeful.
As in every project, that’s where we started: by listening. Qualitative interviews with people across the sustainability department, a mapping of every active initiative, and a workshop to identify and prioritise the big challenges, both internal and external. We didn’t just want to understand what was being done, but why it was so hard for all that sustainability work to be felt and understood inside and outside the department itself. From that listening came the first foundations of what is now Bold Futures.
The vision of Bold Futures is to move from a sustainability treated as an add-on to one that acts as a beacon: the point that guides the business and connects with it.
Under Bold Futures, GRAND gathered the visual, spatial and tonal inconsistencies and set standards to keep them from returning, built on three pillars.
We unified the entire department: presentations, welcome days and internal materials, under a single stylistic concept. Before, each person communicated in their own way, with their own style and their own visual codes, which made things especially hard for anyone new to the team. With Bold Futures, the visual message became consistent across the whole department.
We spotted information gaps between leadership, managers and their teams, so we created a model of meetings at different frequencies to drive transparent communication and cross-functional leadership. In them, updates were shared, what projects were under way and which were still pending, so the whole department started from the same point.
Both digitally and physically, we set out to open communication to the internal team and make sustainability initiatives known through Bold Future’s narrative and visual identity: we centralised and organised all of the department’s materials, the internal newsletter BoldBrief with the most relevant sustainability news, and we even proposed a physical library within the department to keep the team learning in the field.
The focus was on simplifying without losing information. In presentations, in strategy, and in the complex recycling systems where many employees got lost, GRAND was there to make communication flow without friction.
The goal was to permeate sustainability communication across the different departments, so it would stop being an isolated territory and become something shared. Bold Futures left a more connected ecosystem in place, with impact across five layers: between managers and leadership, between managers and teams, across the whole department, with other departments, and outward. So the purpose no longer depends on a few people — it flows through the entire organisation.
