My Biggest Lesson: Alice Date
Alice Date is group sustainability manager at Talon. Previously, Alice served in the Climate Change and Sustainability Services team at EY Melbourne/Sydney, where she played a pivotal role in propelling her team to global recognition by Verdantix as leaders in Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) consulting. Whilst at EY, Alice also contributed to EY Ripples (EY’s global corporate responsibility programme), reflecting her commitment to sustainability beyond the corporate realm. Adding to her professional expertise, she has completed the Sustainable Supply Chain Management programme at the Cambridge Institute for Sustainability Leadership and continues to champion ESG best practice.
My biggest lesson is that you never know which life experiences will end up defining you or your career – it’s important to embrace every opportunity and each interaction.
With a university degree in my back pocket – to my parent’s relief - I moved to Paris as a fresh faced 23-year-old. The city had always excited me. I had dreamed of returning to work following a stint as an au pair years prior - so I did, harnessed with a visa and complete naivety ready to tackle the fashion industry.
I remember sitting on the small bed (the only place I could sit except the floor) of my studio apartment and compiling a list of every fashion show for the upcoming September season - accompanied with as many contacts as physically possible. Having sent 100+ emails stating my eagerness and complete availability/disposability, I sat back and waited for the responses to flood in. It was the pang of stress that came when they didn’t that made me question every decision that had led me to that exact moment – and the absolute relief when a few appeared that reminded me why I had.
The opportunities were all very different – casting, fitting, setting up for the show, changing models in 15 seconds between looks and working in a showroom. It was the latter that turned out to be a defining moment in my career - the showroom was part of a larger company working to push fashion forward into the digital space and leave a more sustainable industry in its wake. The CEO took a chance by taking me on full time to complete a project calculating the carbon footprint of the wholesale fashion process. This role opened my mind to the wider concept that every industry had its own social and environmental impacts and businesses needed to take accountability; CSR wasn’t going to cut it anymore.
Having moved back to Melbourne and into consulting, I was able to get a better understanding about how other industries were dealing with these issues, each project uniquely defining my interests, each interaction defining the leader, colleague, friend and human I wanted to be - which has brought me to my current role at Talon, focusing on sustainability strategy and implementation under an inspiring leadership group.
Ultimately, it’s important to embrace every experience positively with an open mind - you never know what will result in a moment that spins you on your heels into a new direction. It’s hard to think that my career could single handedly rest in the hands of one email, however it’s the lesson of not knowing when the next defining moment will happen that I hold close.
