Uncover Risk and Seize Valuable Opportunities with these Stakeholder Engagement Tools
Challenge
StockX positions their e-commerce platform as a marketplace for trading “current culture” goods. While the company takes pride in reflecting and shaping trends in consumer tastes, they recognized a need to catch up with another, equally critical dimension of current culture: sustainability.
StockX wanted to uplift the communities that use their platform. But to do so they needed to sit down with those communities and ask what issues mattered most to them. This process would be critical for ensuring that the StockX platform remains culturally current and relevant. It would also uncover business risks, allowing the company to transform those risks into value-creating opportunities.
Solutions Delivered
After completing a carbon inventory, TripleWin performed what would become StockX’s first materiality assessment.
The process began with identifying key stakeholder groups and collecting feedback through learning journeys, one-on-one interviews and surveys. It culminated in a materiality map: a two-dimensional plot of ESG topics by their importance to the company’s business and to its stakeholders, both internal and external. This materiality map would allow StockX’s leadership to quickly identify their stakeholders’ greatest concerns and the sustainability initiatives that closely align with their strategic business goals.
TripleWin organized topics from the materiality map by type of impact (environmental, social, governance, and business strategy) and then ranked them by importance. TripleWin then suggested strategies for addressing each topic, resulting in a top-down list of topics and strategies for StockX to prioritize within each field.
Project Learnings
The stakeholder learning journeys revealed that StockX employees and customers care deeply about sustainability and want the company to take a more proactive, committed, long-term approach to ESG issues.
Packaging, employee development, and leadership diversity ranked the highest among stakeholders’ concerns.
- Packaging: Replacing plastic with recycled and biodegradable materials, allowing sellers to opt-in to reuse boxes, and implementing a system-wide recycling program would streamline operations and improve environmental impacts simultaneously.
- Employee development: Employees wanted better-quality training to support their professional development.
- Leadership diversity: More-diverse management and engineering teams would build cultural cohesion and create value relevant to the diverse cultures StockX serves worldwide.
Client Outcomes
The materiality assessment awakened StockX to the needs and concerns of their most important stakeholders.
Equipped with a list of priorities for addressing those concerns, they were now ready to take the next step: defining and disclosing their ESG strategy. This would be critical for expanding their capital pool to include social impact investors.
StockX took that next step by working with TripleWin to build a strategic sustainability roadmap.
Experts
TripleWin Advisory is a boutique corporate consultancy focused on circularity solutions for industry. TripleWin offers a suite of tools to support clients in charting a practical, circular and sustainable course for their business. These tools include:
- Carbon inventories and setting science-based and Net Zero carbon goals
- Materiality assessments and sustainability roadmaps
- Building circular business models supported by financial analysis
- Risk scenario models using the TCFD framework
- Workshops and courses to build employee agency and corporate competency
We work with leaders in the following industries: apparel, footwear & textiles; information technology; metals; beauty; food & beverage; healthcare; building construction; human resource management; and retail.
TripleWin Advisory is a woman-founded and woman-led public benefit company headquartered in the state of Oregon.
StockX is a marketplace for the rarest and most coveted branded consumer products — from Nike Air Jordan sneakers and Rolex watches to Star Wars collectibles. The company matches sellers and buyers anonymously and authenticates all platform purchases at authentication centers strategically placed across the globe.
Headquarters:Detroit, Michigan
Industry:
Consumer Goods
Main Product:
Reselling branded consumer products