Marjorie Yang (MBA 1976), the chairman and CEO of garment-manufacturing giant The Esquel Group, doesn’t spend much time talking about apparel anymore. Instead, she’s focused on improving the livelihood of the company’s 47,000 employees and reducing environmental impact in the company’s 17 plants or offices worldwide—and throughout the garment industry.

“We can be a catalyst of change,” says Yang. Since 1995, she has held a leadership role in the Hong Kong–based company her father founded, which makes more men’s cotton shirts than any other company in the world. Pro-worker and pro-environmental policies are not only a social good, she says. They are also money savers that helped Esquel weather the economic downturn. Now she wants to share her company’s successful strategies with the industry through sustainability conferences and factory tours.

“We’re not going to just count our own commercial success,” Yang says. “We’re going to count how much impact we have on changing the behavior of the whole industry.”

(Published June 2015)

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