Overview
I led product delivery for an ESG assessment and certification platform serving 150+ global luxury brands across beauty, fashion, jewellery, premium drinks, interiors and travel. The platform translates complex regulatory frameworks (CSRD, TCFD, TNFD, SASB, GRI, ISO) into a bespoke assessment journey with scoring, progress tracking and peer benchmarking.
The challenge: Luxury brands face regulatory fragmentation across six overlapping international frameworks. Understanding where they stand on sustainability is critical for board decisions, investor relations and regulatory compliance—but existing manual assessments conducted by sustainability consultants can stretch timelines for months, delaying time to insight. There was no shared visibility between companies and their consultants, and no way to benchmark against peers.
The solution: A SaaS platform with dynamic questionnaires that adapt to each company's size, industry and location, intelligent materiality-weighted scoring, real-time progress dashboards, consultant collaboration tools, and peer benchmarking—turning regulatory compliance from a burden into strategic advantage.
The Problem
Luxury brands struggled with:
- Regulatory fragmentation - navigating six overlapping frameworks with varying materiality across industries
- Manual assessment processes - data collection across distributed teams and supply chains consumed months
- Consultant friction - lack of shared visibility on assessment progress and guidance between brands and advisors
- No peer clarity - brands couldn't benchmark performance against similar companies in their vertical
- Compliance risk - delayed assessments left brands exposed to regulatory penalties and reputational damage
What We Built
A SaaS platform guiding luxury brands through ESG assessment, scoring and continuous improvement:
Dynamic Questionnaire - A conversational assessment that adapts based on company profile. Rather than a static 500-question form, it presents only the 250–500 questions material to that specific business, reducing assessment time from weeks to days.
Intelligent Scoring Engine - Scores that reflect what matters to each industry. Carbon emissions might be critical for a fashion brand but less important for a drinks company—the platform automatically adjusts scoring to match each business's reality.
Business Dashboard - Real-time visibility into ESG scores across three pillars (Governance, Environment, Social), progress on improvement actions, and regulatory change flags that alert companies to upcoming compliance deadlines.
Consultant Portal - A dedicated workspace where sustainability experts communicate assessment findings, guide companies through weak areas, track action implementation, and co-create improvement roadmaps.
Peer Benchmarking - Compare scores against anonymised peers in the same industry vertical—critical for luxury brands making board-level sustainability investment decisions.
Integrated Management System - Tools to turn assessment insights into action: task assignment, budget planning, progress tracking, and integration with third-party data to auto-populate evidence.
Execution & My Role
I owned the product platform from discovery through launch, navigating competing stakeholder needs:
Discovery - Interviewed sustainability consultants, luxury brand executives, compliance teams and regulatory experts to understand assessment needs and user needs.
Roadmap & Translation - Translated complex regulatory frameworks into product requirements. Made trade-offs decisions. Coordinated with sustainability experts to ensure platform logic reflected real-world assessment practices.
Cross-Functional Execution - Worked with engineers on dynamic questionnaire logic, data engineers on materiality weighting, designers on workflows, and customer success and marketing on launch strategy. Balanced brand simplicity (clients wanted fewer questions) with consultant rigour (experts needed granular data).
Impact
- 150+ luxury brands using the platfomr across multiple verticals
- Reduced assessment time from weeks to days through intelligent questionnaire tailoring
- Eliminated duplicate manual processes between assessment and certification
- Enabled peer comparison to drive strategic ESG investment decisions
- Improved consultant productivity through shared visibility on assessments
Why It Mattered
This project required balancing product simplicity with regulatory rigor. Luxury brands needed to feel supported on a complex journey, consultants needed the depth to provide real value, and the platform had to remain defensible under regulatory scrutiny. Every design choice prioritised making sustainability assessment feel achievable rather than overwhelming.
The result: a platform that transformed ESG from a compliance checkbox into a strategic competitive advantage for luxury brands.
Cover photo by Erik Ulbricht on Unsplash