What Happens When You Put Sustainability Practitioners in a Room Full of Students
A few weeks ago on 16th April , our founder Archish was invited to speak at The Creative Business Confluence 2026 at Pearl Academy’s School of Business, a panel on Sustainability, ESG & Responsible Innovation, alongside Lavanya Garg and Sarthak Khandelwal of Vyakti India, moderated by an MBA student who, honestly, asked better questions than most industry panels we have been to.
And that last part is what made this one different.
The audience was students. Future designers, brand managers, entrepreneurs, people who are about to enter an industry still figuring out how to balance sustainability with profitability. There was a sense of enthusiasm in the room that you do not always find at industry events, there were young minds who were inquisitive, strong-willed to know about the realities of an on ground sustainable business. Nobody was half-checking their phone. They were listening, pushing back, and that made the conversation go deeper than it might have otherwise.Most importantly they were inquisitive and that is exactly what we need for our future generation, a room full of minds that question, that want to make a change and who are here to create change.
The panel covered real ground. It drove conversations around ESG and how it is changing the business world and their foundational beliefs? How do sustainable or circular products compete in a market thriving on profitability? How do you make the revenue model revenue positive when there is a perception gap that exists in this market. Is India ready for a circular fashion consumer and how are upcoming fashion houses addressing this?
Archish spoke about what sustainability looks like in practice at Respun, not the polished version meant for papers, but the real one. The logistics. The funding gaps. The challenge of convincing people that something made from recycled fabric can be just as desirable as something made from scratch. And the honest truth that circularity does not sell itself. It needs storytelling, trust, and consistent proof before the market follows.
He also spoke about something that does not get discussed enough, the gap between purpose and profitability. At Respun, every decision has to hold both. You cannot build a sustainable business by ignoring margins, and you cannot build a meaningful one by ignoring impact. Navigating that every single day, especially when you are trying to scale, is genuinely hard. And saying that out loud in a room full of students felt important, because the industry does not always admit that and it was imperative and the upcoming entrepreneurs knew the gaps in the market and worked to find innovative methods to address it.
What stayed with us after was not any single answer. It was the quality of the questions being asked by the next generation entering this industry. They are not satisfied with vague commitments or recycled talking points. They want to know what is actually changing and who is accountable for it.
That gives us a lot of hope. Because if they are already asking harder questions, the industry is going to have to work a lot harder to keep up.
That is exactly the kind of generation we are trying to build to sustain the economy of change.
