Season Two, Episode 10: Being the Splinter: Deanna Bratter on Sustainability, Business and Creating Lasting Change

The Tailspin:

Deanna didn’t grow up planning to become a corporate sustainability executive. In fact, when she was in college, the career she would eventually build barely existed.

“When I went to school, there was no such thing as a sustainability degree,” she says.

Instead, she followed her curiosity through anthropology, religious studies, environmental archaeology and museum studies. But underneath those seemingly different interests was something much more consistent.

“I always wanted to be a helper.”

Even as a child, Deanna was thinking about the relationship between people and the environment. She remembers the Exxon Valdez oil spill inspiring a fifth-grade report about protecting animals from the consequences of human decisions.

Eventually, she began recognizing the larger idea that would define her career.

“I just knew that we humans — and the intersection of business — we have impacts and those impacts can be negative or they can be positive.”

Her professional journey began far from footwear.

After moving to Colorado, Deanna took an entry-level customer service job with Silk plant-based milks. She began volunteering for anything she could from community outreach, nonprofit partnerships, recycling, composting and even selecting sustainable furniture.

She kept raising her hand, learning and finding ways to bring sustainability into business decisions. Eventually, she discovered a principle that would stay with her throughout her career: right livelihood.

“It’s a Buddhist principle around aligning your ethical values with your living, your work and earning a wage. And that principle has really stayed with me in the development of my career of how do I bring my values into the work I do?”

After nearly two decades in the food industry, Deanna was ready for a new challenge.

In 2022, she joined Crocs as its first head of sustainability. 

The products were different. The underlying challenge wasn’t.

The Work:

Moving from food to footwear might appear to be a dramatic shift, but Deanna quickly discovered how much the sustainability challenges had in common.

“The issues are the issues — climate, greenhouse gas emissions, waste, water, energy, nature, working with suppliers, whether they’re farmers or materials producers,” she explains.

The solutions, however, can look very different.

At Crocs, that means examining everything from materials and manufacturing to transportation, waste and what happens to a shoe after the consumer is finished wearing it.

It also means understanding that sustainability has to work within the realities of a publicly traded company.

Deanna describes her approach as “pragmatic activism” — understanding the needs of the business while searching for opportunities that can simultaneously benefit people and the planet.

“Can we do this in a way that meets all of those needs for our investors and our financial obligations in a way that also considers the impacts on people and planet?”

That’s an important distinction. Crocs isn’t trying to transform itself into a sustainability company.

“We’re just trying to be Crocs a little better for people and the planet.”

For Deanna, making that happen sometimes requires being willing to make people a little uncomfortable.

She calls it “be the splinter.”

“Sustainability inherently is going against the grain,” she suggests, but a splinter gets noticed. It asks questions. It challenges the way things have always been done.

“A splinter can be a little annoying. It can be a little uncomfortable, but that’s our job to ask questions, to propose different ways of doing things that might feel a little bit uncomfortable,” she says, “but it’s not all that painful in the end.”

Being the splinter doesn’t mean ignoring business realities. In fact, Deanna believes successful sustainability initiatives need to work alongside them.

“It’s less about the ‘or’ and more about the ‘and.’”

Can a company reduce waste and reduce costs? Can it introduce better materials and strengthen the brand? Can it meet financial objectives and create a positive environmental impact?

That search for the “and” is where sustainability becomes a business strategy.

The Tailwind: 

One of the clearest examples of that philosophy is something almost every consumer understands: an old pair of shoes sitting in the closet.

Crocs’ Old Crocs New Life program allows consumers to return Crocs in any condition through participating stores and mail-back programs.

The company then determines what happens next.

“If they’re wearable, they go into programs like Soles for Souls where they can find their next life through really incredible social impact, social entrepreneurship programs. And if they’re not wearable, they actually go to recyclers.”

Some of those recycled materials have even found their way back into new Crocs.

But for Deanna, programs like these illustrate something larger than recycling. They’re an opportunity to rethink how business approaches sustainability altogether.

“You have to make it easy, you have to make it accessible, and you have to keep it affordable.”

That’s particularly important because what consumers say they want and what they ultimately purchase aren’t always the same thing.

Rather than asking customers to choose between affordability and sustainability, Crocs is looking for ways to remove the trade-off.

That philosophy extends beyond environmental impact.

As Chief Sustainability and Compliance Officer, Deanna also oversees areas including social compliance, environmental compliance and chemicals management. That means considering not only what goes into a shoe, but the people who make it.

“There are people who are touching many people who are touching every component of bringing footwear to life.”

It also requires partnership.

Crocs can’t solve the environmental and social challenges facing the footwear industry by itself — and Deanna doesn’t believe it should try.

“The power that we have is to be a bit of a catalyst,” she says, “to take that Crocs innovative entrepreneurial mindset and be able to innovate.”

That could mean piloting a takeback program, finding new applications for recycled footwear materials or developing innovations that other companies can eventually use.

Because the bigger goal isn’t simply making Crocs more sustainable.

It’s helping move an entire industry forward.

“Everyone knows we’ve got a consumption challenge and it’s going to take systems change to solve it.”

And when Deanna looks decades into the future, that’s the impact she hopes lasts.

Not simply the programs she launched or the goals Crocs achieved, but the people inspired to continue pushing for change.

“If I look back, it’s less about what I achieved, it’s less about what Crocs achieved,” she shares. “It’s more about ensuring that we’re inspiring others to see their potential and the opportunity in themselves to be the agent of change — the tipping point — so that business is a force for good in the world.” 

Ultimately, the future Deanna envisions is one where sustainability no longer needs its own argument, department or justification.

“It’s not optional for a business to think about sustainability,” she says. “It’s just part of what you do to be a good business.”

To hear more from Deanna Bratter about sustainability, circularity, consumer behavior, corporate responsibility and how Crocs is working to create a positive impact for people and the planet, listen to the full episode of re:Purpose with Buddy Teaster.