O'Neill, the surf-born action-sports and outdoor apparel brand, had never measured a product footprint. As a voluntary reporter outside the CSRD threshold, nothing forced the work except O'Neill's own commitment to its climate strategy. Working with Root, the brand mapped Scope 1, 2 and 3 emissions and footprinted 1,178 products across its full European range in around six months. The assessment covered product LCA, GHG accounting, and scenario modelling. The result surfaced a clear priority: 98.4% of emissions sit in Scope 3. Root is now the data foundation beneath O'Neill's climate strategy.
Starting from a blank page
O'Neill has always made deliberate choices in product development. What it did not have was the data to know whether those choices were the right ones. Decisions were made on experience and instinct, without a measured view of where impact actually sat.
The push to change came from several directions at once. A double materiality assessment exposed clear gaps in O'Neill's environmental data. The coming Digital Product Passport will require brands to say something credible about product footprints. And large B2B customers began cascading their own science-based targets down the supply chain, turning a nice-to-have into a commercial reality.
What stands out is that O'Neill was never obliged to do this. The company falls outside the CSRD threshold and chose to build a foundation anyway, to lead rather than wait.
Choosing a partner, not just a platform
O'Neill spoke with a range of providers, from consultants to software platforms. Consultants were ruled out early. The team wanted to build lasting internal knowledge and own its data, not rent an answer that walked out the door at the end of a project.
Among the platforms, O'Neill was looking for real depth on complex material without an enterprise price tag or a black box, and a partner that would go into the detail alongside them. Root being a Dutch company made it easier to get into difficult, unfamiliar territory together. But what sealed the decision was the people.
Building the foundation, fast
O'Neill started with one category, swim shorts, and within a few months had loaded its full range. What would normally be a daunting first year of carbon accounting was, in Janine's words, simply handled.
In the early weeks Root was in contact every week, building templates directly from O'Neill's raw data and guiding each step. The hardest part was matching hundreds of materials to the right impact factors, work O'Neill could not have done alone. Root has since built that step into the platform with AI, so it now takes a fraction of the time.
The partnership also shaped the product itself. The supplier invite link, now used to gather primary data directly from suppliers, began as an O'Neill request. The scenario and material builders were developed in close dialogue with the team.
Seeing where impact really sits
With scope 1, 2 and 3 measured across the range, O'Neill could finally see the shape of its footprint, and it held some clarifying surprises.
At 98.4 percent, O'Neill's scope 3 share sits above the roughly 90 percent typical for the industry. Materials account for 69 percent of the total, concentrated in a handful of high-impact fibres. Transport, so often the focus of sustainability conversations, turned out to be a small fraction of the whole.
The data also reached decisions that used to be invisible. Air-freighting a delayed order, for example, was once a purely logistical call. Now O'Neill can see exactly what it costs in carbon, and weigh it.
Internally, the numbers changed the conversation. Scope 1, 2 and 3 results were published in O'Neill's 2024 Sustainability Report and presented to the leadership team, with Root's experts in the room to answer questions directly.
Perhaps the clearest shift is in fluency. O'Neill went from a standing start to genuinely understanding its own footprint: how carbon accounting works, how to reason with documented assumptions, and where its impact truly concentrates. A springboard, rather than a one-off report.
From measuring to a plan
O'Neill's next step is a climate plan, working toward science-based-target-aligned goals. Root is the foundation beneath it, not only to set targets, but to set ones the business can realistically reach.
Using scenario modelling that includes cost, O'Neill can weigh which combination of changes delivers the greatest reduction for the investment, instead of setting targets on intuition and hoping.
One example is already in motion. O'Neill is exploring alternative dyeing techniques, working with a manufacturer whose process claims a meaningful reduction in impact. Often several levers stack on a single garment at once, such as a recycled material together with a lower-impact dye process. Rather than take a supplier's claim at face value, the team can feed the real data into Root and see exactly what each lever does to the footprint, testing it before committing. Nothing is fixed yet, but for the first time these choices can be weighed on evidence rather than instinct.
And in a regulatory landscape still taking shape, from the Digital Product Passport to France's eco-score, O'Neill values a data foundation flexible enough to serve whatever form the rules finally take. The underlying data stays the same; only the output changes.
For sustainability teams starting from a blank page, O'Neill's story shows how far a brand can travel in a matter of months: from no measured footprint at all, to a full LCA-based view across its entire range, to a credible plan for what to do next.