Jason Kibbey nearly missed the job that would put him in charge of measuring fashion’s environmental footprint. He was applying to lead the Sustainable Apparel Coalition, and the final interview round was slipping away. Then an executive-search consultant happened to speak with Kellie McElhaney, a Berkeley mentor who did not know he was applying. She recommended him anyway. A note to the hiring committee followed. Kibbey got another chance, then the job.
It is a pleasingly untidy beginning for a career devoted to making things comparable. The future of a measurement system turned, in part, on a conversation nobody had scheduled for that purpose. When Kibbey recalled the episode years later, he gave McElhaney credit. His route through business has often depended on people willing to connect an environmental ambition with something practical: a class, a prototype, an introduction, an organization.
That route has now brought him back to UC Berkeley. In January 2025, he announced his appointment as inaugural executive director of its Master of Climate Solutions program. The founder of Higg Co., later renamed Worldly, was returning to the university where he had studied and started a clothing business. There is a certain symmetry here. Once, the classroom helped him make a company. Now, his experience making companies has become material for the classroom.
The business school project you could wear
Before there was a software platform, there was underwear. Kibbey and Jeff Denby met in Berkeley’s MBA program in 2006. They shared an interest in environmental advocacy and began developing a garment business. Their first iteration emerged from Sara Beckman’s product-development course, where an idea had to survive the journey from discussion to something somebody could actually use.
Underwear was an unusually sensible place to begin. It was an everyday purchase, with room to rethink materials, manufacturing and design. It also spared the founders the burden of persuading customers to adopt an entirely new habit. People already understood the product category rather well. The more difficult proposition was persuading them that an ordinary garment could carry an environmental commitment without looking like homework.
Designer Yves Béhar saw the student project and became a partner. His studio, fuseproject, worked on the designs and the wider identity. PACT launched in August 2009 with prints connected to nonprofit partners, including Oceana, ForestEthics and 826 National. The original arrangement directed ten percent of gross revenue from each garment to its corresponding cause. The founders were selling an object, a design and a way to participate.
The choices extended to details that a shopper might never notice. At launch, the supply chain sat within a hundred-mile radius in Turkey. Leftover fabric became matching garment bags. Certain inks and bright whites were left out of the palette. Those decisions gave the founders’ principles a physical form: color, packaging, geography. An environmental argument had to fit inside a parcel and survive a customer’s laundry basket.
PACT’s cheerful slogan put the ambition somewhere unceremonious: “Change starts with your underwear.” The joke worked because it lowered the temperature of the sales pitch. Environmental concern could coexist with attractive design and a little silliness. A company asking customers to care about its supply chain still had to make clothes they wanted to wear.
From one garment to everybody’s report card
Kibbey had arrived at entrepreneurship with an unusual set of studies behind him: environmental economics and policy, religious studies, then a Berkeley Haas MBA, completed in 2008. His early career included consulting at Bain & Company and environmental campaigns at Patagonia. He also co-founded Freedom to Roam, an initiative concerned with wildlife corridors and connected landscapes in North America.
Economics asks how incentives work. Religious studies gives a person another way to think about values. A business degree supplies a vocabulary for budgets and organizations. It would be too neat to turn those subjects into a formula for his later decisions. Still, they make an apt educational background for someone whose work repeatedly asks companies to translate a stated belief into a procedure.
The Sustainable Apparel Coalition grew out of an alliance between Patagonia and Walmart. That pairing offered a fairly good test of whether environmental cooperation could stretch beyond companies that already resembled one another. Competitors could continue competing over products while working together on how to measure the consequences of making them. Kibbey became the coalition’s founding chief executive and first employee.
Under his leadership, the coalition developed and launched the Higg Index. Its tools addressed different views of production: facilities, materials, products and companies. In a 2016 explanation, he described the system as a report card, with no pass-fail criteria. That distinction matters. A report card offers information about performance. It still leaves somebody responsible for deciding what to do about the result.
“We encourage members to work transparently.”Jason Kibbey, Fibre2Fashion interview
There is nothing especially theatrical about agreeing on a questionnaire. Yet agreement is part of the work. If buyers ask incompatible questions, suppliers spend time translating between them. A shared framework gives participants a place to begin comparing answers. Its usefulness depends on the quality of those answers and on whether the comparison prompts a decision. The spreadsheet has a supporting role; the people holding the purchasing budgets retain the speaking parts.
When the software needed its own company
By November 2018, the coalition was launching updated facility tools for environmental performance and social and labor assessment. The environmental module was already being used at more than 10,000 factories worldwide. The platform added ways to share information, examine results and compare performance. Building a common framework had produced a second challenge: operating the machinery that made the framework usable.
In May 2019, the coalition launched Higg Co. as a separate technology venture, with Kibbey as CEO. The methodology remained with the nonprofit; the new company developed the software. For a founder, this was another change of scale. PACT had sold garments. The coalition had convened an industry. Higg Co. would need to deliver a working platform to the organizations participating in that industry.
The early company reports show the change in operating demands. Higg’s second-anniversary announcement described a team that had grown from twenty employees in 2019 to seventy-three in 2021. It also reported faster assessment completion and more sharing of results between partners. These are the small improvements that make software useful: fewer obstacles between a person and the information needed for a decision.
A $50 million Series B followed in April 2022, co-led by Silversmith Capital Partners and Galvanize Climate Solutions, with Titan Grove and Buckhill participating. The announcement reported close to 50,000 brand and manufacturer users across more than a hundred countries. Kibbey emphasized the difficulty of obtaining accurate information from factories a consumer-goods company did not own. Buying from a business and knowing that business are separate accomplishments.
Company funding, not personal wealth.
A score meets the shop floor
The work became contentious when measurement moved into consumer claims. In 2022, Norwegian regulators challenged the use of Higg Materials Sustainability Index data in clothing marketing. The coalition paused its consumer-facing transparency program. Kibbey acknowledged that the company could have contextualized its data better while defending the tools’ use in business decisions.
That episode exposes a problem familiar to anyone who has tried to compress a complicated judgment into a convenient score. Numbers travel easily. Their qualifications often travel in a separate suitcase. A business tool and a claim on a garment label ask different things of the reader. The label has very little room to explain what was measured, which assumptions were used or which questions remain outside the calculation.
For Kibbey’s story, the dispute belongs beside the funding and adoption figures. A growing user base measures participation. It does not settle every question about how a result should be interpreted. The ambition to make information widely usable brings a responsibility to explain its boundaries. A tool designed to help people choose becomes more consequential as more people rely on it.
Higg Co. relaunched as Worldly in May 2023. That July, Scott Raskin became CEO, and Kibbey moved toward a founder-and-president role based in Paris. The announcement described his work as supporting the company’s engagement with customers, regulators and other stakeholders. He had helped build the organization; another executive would take responsibility for its next operating chapter.
The classroom after the spreadsheet
Kibbey’s impatience with distant promises predates his Berkeley return. A 2018 conversation with the Sustainable Fashion Academy examined how visions of circular production could distract from proven improvements available immediately. The episode’s title referred to “Circular Fairies.” It is a memorable name for a temptation: allowing an appealing future system to excuse postponing work that can already begin.
In his 2024 Climate One conversation, he also discussed the tension between efficiency and increasing sales. A company can improve the footprint of each item while growth makes its overall reductions harder to achieve. The observation complicates the comforting story in which every better product automatically adds up to a better outcome. Arithmetic has very little respect for a good campaign slogan.
Berkeley’s climate program gives these questions a practical setting. It combines science, economics, technology and policy with a capstone involving a partner organization. At his appointment, Kibbey’s responsibilities included developing partnerships and teaching capstone and colloquium courses. The university’s current program site also lists him as an assistant adjunct professor. Students encounter both analysis and the organizational work required to put it to use.
The return carries a human connection as well as an institutional one. Kibbey publicly described working with the next generation of climate leaders at his alma mater as a dream come true. Years earlier, somebody there had helped turn his own ambition into an interview opportunity. Now he occupies a position from which he can help other people make their next practical move.
His career offers several scales at which to attempt that move: one product, a group of competitors, a technology company, a classroom. Each has given him a different set of people to work with and a different obstacle to solve. The underwear could be designed. The questionnaire could be agreed. The software could be built. The harder, continuing question is what someone does once the parcel arrives, the score appears or the course ends.