Bergmeyer partners to launch retailer-focused sustainability consultancy

Bergmeyer has joined forces with the Sustainability Management  & Strategy Collaborative n to launch a retailer-focused sustainability consultancy.

The new Bergmeyer+ will help retailers align their overarching purpose and mission with their store design sustainability goals. Focusing initially on retail store fixtures, the consultancy aims to benchmark, evaluate and optimize carbon, chemistry and circularity for retail brands’ store fixture programs based on information provided by the client, the client’s fixture vendors and the vendors’ raw materials suppliers. 

The Bergmeyer+ team will work with retail partners to provide a comprehensive sustainability goal rubric for fixtures, a fixture supply chain comparative evaluation, and an overview of benchmarking results that will help lay the groundwork to create a sustainability assessment and implementation roadmap to meet the established corporate sustainability goals.

“I was astonished when we first dug into the retail fixture market and understood the breadth and width of its impacts,” said Annie Bevan, CEO and founder of SMS Collaborative. “Retailers everywhere are looking to make a shift towards sustainability, but they’re often missing this huge piece of the puzzle.  That’s what makes this partnership with Bergmeyer so exciting because we have this huge opportunity to come together to support companies seeking a clearer path to meet their toxicity, carbon, and circularity goals in collaboration with their fixture suppliers.”

Although industry-led sustainability commitments are widespread, there is limited innovation focused on store fixtures and the in-store environment. This is despite the U.S. retail store fixture Industry reaching an estimated $8.6 billion in revenue in 2023 alone (according to a 2023 report from IBISWorld).

With much of the innovation concentrated on the product level within the retail market, Bergmeyer+ aims to go beyond the retail industry’s standard sustainability practices by focusing not only on product and packaging, but more importantly the very shelves they sit on. While the industry may have many lofty corporate sustainable goals in place, existing practices are falling short of those goals, and typically leave out large components of the store elements like store fixtures, visual merchandising, and marketing tangibles, according to a Bergmeyer+ release. 

“We started Bergmeyer+ for the very simple reason that there seemed to be a gap in terms of agreed standard terms, in terms of go-to resources and most of all in terms of an overarching industry strategy towards a greener future,” said Christian Davies, principal, Bergmeyer.  

Bergmeyer has offices in Boston, Los Angeles, and Columbus.