From pioneering brands and retailers to producers, suppliers, farmers, and recyclers—achieving our climate and nature goals depends on action at every level of the supply network. These annual awards celebrate the individuals and partnerships creating measurable change in the way fibers and raw materials are produced. 

This year the awards were presented at a ceremony during the annual Textile Exchange conference, on Wednesday evening at Estufa Fria in Lisbon, Portugal. All this year’s winners excelled in their field, demonstrating an impact-focused mindset that is helping the fashion, textile, and apparel industry move forward in alignment with Textile Exchange’s 2030 Climate+ strategy goals. As their prize, each award winner will receive one gifted ticket to our annual conference in 2026, to be held in Vancouver, Canada, October 12–16. 

The winners 

Textile-to-Textile Partnership Award 

This award celebrates a collaboration between a recycler and a value chain partner who are working together to close the loop. Through shared commitment, investment, and innovation, the winning partnership contributes to scaling preferred recycled systems, with the potential to shift both practice and perception across the industry.  

Winners: Recover and Intradeco 

“By combining Recover’s pioneering recycled cotton fiber technology with Intradeco’s vertically integrated manufacturing platform, we have created a transformative model for textile-to-textile recycling in the Americas. Together, we are building Recover™ Central America, a regional hub in El Salvador that produces high-quality recycled fiber at scale, helping brands meet the growing demand for recycled content while reducing lead times, lowering environmental impact, and strengthening supply chain resilience.  

The partnership brings the best of both worlds: Recover™ contributes decades of recycling expertise, traceability technology, and verified environmental data, while Intradeco adds local leadership, market access, and end-to-end apparel manufacturing capabilities. The result is a transparent, efficient, and scalable supply chain rooted in circularity.” 

Regenerative Land Leadership Award 

This award honors a fiber producer who is putting regenerative principles into practice—not just through intention, but through active measurement and accountability. From soil health to biodiversity, the recipient demonstrates outcomes that support nature-positive transformation on the ground. 

Winner: James Brodie 

“I’m deeply honoured to receive [this award]. This recognition is both humbling and affirming—it reflects the collective effort of so many people working to heal our landscapes and build a thriving future for both nature and humanity. 

I want to acknowledge my wider team—the older and wiser mentors who guided me, our focused regenerative farmers group who support, challenge and inspire, and my dedicated teams on the ground who bring this work to life every day. This award belongs to all of them too, 

On our farm, regeneration is not just a method, it’s a mindset. Working with nature, we are seeing soil health, biodiversity, water systems and productivity restored, and with them, renewed hope for the future.” 

Collaboration in Action Award 

This award recognizes a partnership between a brand and a Tier 4 organization working together to shift the system. Whether through ecosystem protection, improved land stewardship, or shared investment in new practices, the winning collaboration exemplifies how cross-supply network partnerships can drive real impact and act as a model for others seeking to do the same. 

Winners: Victoria’s Secret and Alabama farm partners 

“It’s an honor to accept this award on behalf of our team and farm partners. 

Our program started in 2020 with an idea of sourcing cotton differently. Cotton is complex: it touches many hands, and with that lack of transparency, you can get bad actors and practices. We started traveling to farms, meeting with farmers, beginning to understand their worlds. Those early conversations on the farms laid the groundwork to develop our program—a program developed in partnership working with four family farms in Alabama, three women-owned, one black-owned, where we contract directly. So we know exactly who grows our cotton and how it is grown. And farmers get full profit for their fiber, no middleman.  

I won’t sugarcoat it, this is not the easy way of doing business. Doing things differently rarely is. We had to learn new muscles: how to draw up contracts with farmers, estimating how much cotton we’d need in two years for our products, how to move cotton fiber, building relationships with spinners to run separate lines, keeping the fiber traceable all the way through the supply chain. But it’s been worth it.” 

 Ryan Young Climate Leader Award 

Named in memory of Ryan Young, our late COO and the driving force behind our Climate+ strategy, this award honors an individual who is showing bold leadership in reducing emissions at the raw material level. The recipient demonstrates not only a deep commitment to climate action, but the ability to deliver measurable outcomes that support both climate and nature goals across fiber and material production. 

Winner: Pablo Borelli 

“We need to change the way we produce our food and fiber, while repairing the damage caused to our ecosystem and its climate […] When you source from regenerative farms, you are not only improving your supply chain, you are telling a family in the middle of Patagonia that doing good matters. When you neutralize your carbon footprint with credits that come from truly regenerative farmers, you are contributing to accelerating the change and making those farmers viable.  You can bring hope to each of those climate warriors that assumed the role of bringing grasslands back to life.   

 So, along with my deepest gratitude for this recognition, I invite you to work together to make regeneration the new rule at a global scale, more than the exception.”