CASE STUDY
Helping VCNY Home Maintain Giga Guru Status Through Walmart’s Project Gigaton™
RyeStrategy’s CDP accreditation helps VCNY Home fulfill supplier climate disclosure requirements and reduce carbon emissions
pillows, residential lighting, and more, through dozens of major home retailers including Walmart, Sam’s Club, Dollar General, and Amazon.
Leveraging a distribution sales model, VCNY Home’s customers range from small businesses to mass, high volume retailers. Maintaining strong relationships and preferred supplier status with these major retailer customers is paramount to VCNY Home’s continued growth.
Founded in 1987, VCNY Home designs and manufactures high quality, affordable home decor products for top-rated brands globally. Starting as a family owned company headquartered in North Bergen, NJ, and now with additional offices in both India and China, VCNY Home has built an expanding family of exclusive brands, designs and manufactures for licensed brands and influential partners, and is a trusted manufacturing partner to the world’s biggest retailers. Consumers can shop these high quality home textiles and decor products including bedding, area rugs,
“We were looking to partner with a firm who specialized in CDP reporting as the data collection and reporting process was tedious and complex.
I consulted CDP’s list of recommended firms and that is how I found RyeStrategy.”
Donna Gilleece-Smith, Quality Assurance & Compliance Manager, VCNY Home
A Complex Request from an Important Customer: Walmart
Walmart, one of VCNY Home’s largest customers, introduced a new supplier climate program in 2017 called Project Gigaton™ with an impressive goal to reduce one billion metric tons of greenhouse gasses (GHG) across their supply chain by 2030. As the rollout of this program progressed, VCNY Home received a request from Walmart to complete an annual GHG inventory and disclose this data to CDP, previously known as the Climate Disclosure Project. In addition, Walmart requested that VCNY Home develop a plan for reducing their carbon emissions over time and work toward implementing this plan. With this request from Walmart, the VCNY Home team was
excited to collect and analyze their carbon emissions data and to create a plan to reduce their emissions. “We’ve always been mindful of doing right for the planet and always try to make environmentally-friendly business decisions,” explained Donna Gilleece-Smith, Quality Assurance and Compliance Manager at VCNY Home. “We were looking forward to quantifying our efforts and implementing mitigation strategies across our business to reduce our carbon footprint.” To ensure Walmart’s request was completed accurately and efficiently, VCNY Home sought support from a specialized partner.
Finding a Reliable Carbon Management Partner
Walmart’s request required that VCNY Home disclose specific climate data to CDP, a global environmental disclosure platform used by over 23,000 companies, through an annual, comprehensive questionnaire. “We were looking to partner with a firm who specialized in CDP reporting as the data collection and reporting process was tedious and complex. I consulted CDP’s list of recommended firms and that is how I found RyeStrategy,” explained Donna.
During the initial meeting with RyeStrategy, Donna felt assured the team had the necessary skills to complete this project, “We had a lot of questions and were pleased to find a specialized firm that clearly knew what they were doing. We all felt confident that RyeStrategy was going to be able to help us fulfill Walmart’s requirements.” After their discovery call, Donna and team decided to move forward with the RyeStrategy partnership.
“We had a lot of questions and were pleased to find a specialized firm that clearly knew what they were doing.
We all felt confident that RyeStrategy was going to be able to help us fulfill Walmart’s requirements.”
Donna Gilleece-Smith, VCNY Home
Smooth Sailing with RyeStrategy
Now that RyeStrategy was managing the data collection and emissions calculation process, each step of the process was clearly defined and aligned to the required disclosure timeline. RyeStrategy demonstrated expertise in navigating the Walmart supplier emissions reporting as outlined in the Project Gigaton requirements.
Donna recalled her experience working with the RyeStrategy team,
“With RyeStrategy managing the project, everything went smoothly. We met with our RyeStrategy sustainability manager weekly to address data collection roadblocks, answer questions, and keep the project timeline on track.” Donna and the team were impressed by the breadth of knowledge across the RyeStrategy team and the peace of mind this gave to VCNY Home business leaders.
RyeStrategy has been instrumental in helping VCNY Home reach their sustainability objectives by assisting them in meeting Walmart’s program requirements. In addition, VCNY Home has observed a rise in internal sustainability awareness among employees. They have successfully implemented emissions mitigation strategies such as transitioning to LED lighting across their facilities and introducing product packaging efficiencies that reduce shipping package sizes, consequently reducing carbon emissions related to shipping.
Walmart “Giga Guru” Status and Beyond
Now that VCNY Home has implemented carbon accounting processes, they will continue to reduce emissions over time and will have real data to show their progress.
In 2024, Target, another valued VCNY Home customer, began rolling out supplier sustainability requirements and this time, the VCNY Home team fielded this request with confidence and simplicity knowing that VCNY Home is already tracking this data.
“If you’re a supplier considering working with RyeStrategy, my advice is to just do it. It will make your life easier and your project less stressful. The team is nice, helpful, and knowledgeable.”
Donna Gilleece-Smith, VCNY Home
Make Carbon Management Easy
Knowing that many suppliers are being faced with similar requests, Donna shared this advice, “If you’re a supplier considering working with RyeStrategy, my advice is to just do it. It will make your life easier and your project less stressful. The team is nice, helpful, and knowledgeable.”
For many suppliers, navigating climate disclosure requirements from large customers can be intimidating and disruptive. RyeStrategy aims to support supplier companies with empowering emissions education and tailored mitigation strategies to pursue decarbonization. While the carbon management process can seem daunting at first, working with RyeStrategy, a CDP-accredited firm, will enable companies to complete this process efficiently and affordably.
Learn more about the VCNY Home story.
Learn about our affordable carbon accounting solutions for small and medium-sized businesses
Talk with a RyeStrategy sustainability manager to learn more.