Maggie Spicer, Attorney & Sustainability Strategist, On ESG (Or Whatever You Call It)

Beauty companies that have embraced Sustainability as a means of promoting operational efficiencies are feeling the recent impacts of tariffs less acutely. For Maggie Spicer, attorney and founder of Source Beauty, the work she’s doing with clients hasn’t changed dramatically. “It’s just the framing that’s different,” she said.

Not only does Sustainability remain relevant in 2025’s unprecedented business landscape, but it also can provide companies with distinct competitive advantages with respect to supply chain management and tariff impact mitigation, according to attorney and Sustainability strategist Maggie Spicer, founder of Source Beauty.

“The tariff updates can feel chaotic. It’s going to be an adjustment for our industry,” Spicer said. “But what I’ve found is that the companies who treated Sustainability as a substantive, business operations issue, rather than a marketing issue – they are the ones who are most prepared to deal with the economic impact. Because for a lot of Sustainability, we think of it as this ‘feel good’ bucket of issues, but it’s really about resource efficiency. How are we minimizing our impact and actually getting the most out of the work that we’re doing?”

She added, “When we think about Sustainability in that context, all of a sudden it becomes, ‘Oh my gosh, I can’t afford to not be thinking about these things in this climate.”

She gave the example of companies that have streamlined freight and logistics to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and increase speed to market; they, in turn, stand to be better insulated against tariffs. “It’s going to reduce the number of times that your products are hit by tariffs if you don’t have them going back and forth and back and forth,” Spicer said.

In her view, Sustainability is as vital as ever, even if the conversation around it has changed.

“Now people want to think about their supply chains because of tariffs, whereas before they were thinking about their supply chain because of environmental emissions and impact. Or they were worried about the labor conditions in countries where they didn’t have strong partnerships, so they wanted to onshore anyway. So a lot of the work stays the same. It’s just the framing that’s different.”

Driving Sustainability ROI

Spicer served previously as an associate at global law firm White & Case, specializing in international trade and business and human rights before moving in-house at Amazon to serve as supply chain regulatory counsel. She founded Source Beauty in May 2022 to help brands navigate the complexities of environmental, social, and governance (ESG) issues, focusing on product design, marketing, compliance, and corporate strategy. Her firm integrates legal expertise with strategic Sustainability advice, offering tailored solutions to help brands build credibility and align with evolving regulatory standards.

Spicer’s clients span the gamut from publicly traded multinationals to pre-launch indie brands, all seeking a Sustainability approach that fits their business.

“Some companies want to do the full shebang, they want to be the corporate leader in Sustainability. But most brands are saying, for example, our consumers really care about ingredient sourcing, or we have a younger consumer who cares about sustainable packaging. So it’s really that kind of bespoke, tailored approach that I try to focus on and work with my clients on, as well as identifying the risks involved. That’s where the legal piece of it comes in, understanding regulations like Extended Producer Responsibility (EPR), greenwashing and green claims.”

Sustainability has evolved over the past decade from a niche issue championed by mission-driven beauty brands to a cultural touchstone. At the same time, ESG has come under scrutiny in recent years due to concerns ranging from lack of standardization across ESG scoring metrics to ESG’s perceived potential to interfere with free markets or fiduciary duties. 

In this climate, Spicer is frequently approached by companies that have seen the benefits and ROI of Sustainability – for example in cost savings or employee retention and recruitment. The question they pose is: “How do we continue to progress in this political environment? How do we embed it in the organization so it doesn’t get lost or deprioritized as a nice-to-have.”

Spicer, who also is a certified skin care formulator, works with leaders across organizations – in Product Development, Marketing, Procurement and Logistics – to align goals and practices and foster a cross-functional approach to Sustainability.

“I’m never going to tell a Procurement specialist the best way for them to source materials. But what I can do is help train them in responsible procurement, and they will then say, ‘Okay, this is what’s going to work for us, and this is what won’t,’ and then we go from there. So as opposed the top-down model where you’ve got one Sustainability person who’s just kind of preaching to the organization, you make it part of everyone’s job, and then it starts doing the work for you,” she said.

She added, “If it’s siloed off, it’s very hard to recoup the investment.”

Typically, Spicer works with smaller brands for an initial three to six months to build and begin implementing a roadmap based on their strategic goals, target consumer and other factors. “A lot of them are targeting external investment or they’ve got a gold-star retailer that they want to get on the shelves of. One of the best ways you can distinguish yourself is by meeting those retailer Sustainability standards or by showing investors, look, we’ve got things shored up on the back end – we’re treating ourselves like a bigger company. You don’t need a 20-person social impact team to really do some substantive work.”

Once the wheels are turning, Spicer’s clients are invited to return to Source Beauty when they are ready to level up or as new issues arise.

Spicer acknowledged that Sustainability can be daunting for small businesses at the outset. “Some small brands will say, ‘I’m looking at what Estee Lauder is doing, and it’s so unrelatable.’ It should be unrelatable. You’re not Estee Lauder. We can make it work for you.”

The end product of that work is greater agility as brands scale their businesses, whether it’s called Sustainability or any other term they feel comfortable using in today’s climate, where anti-ESG sentiment can make some companies skittish.

“If you’re nervous about how your investors are going to treat it, or how the media may talk about this work, maybe you just call it something different. I don’t care if a company doesn’t want to use ‘ESG ‘ or ‘Sustainability,’ I’m not the Marketing team. If they want to call it Resource Efficiency, great. If they want to call it Employee Turnover Reduction, great. At the end of the day, it’s really about doing what’s best for the business, and a lot of times that is also better for the planet,” she said.

Spicer frequently lectures on the intersection of Sustainability and beauty, including at the Fashion Institute of Technology in New York and the Presidio Graduate School in Los Angeles. She is a member of the Positive Luxury Impact Network and THE BOARD; VP of Professional Development at the Washington, DC-based Association of Women in International Trade (WIIT); an advisor for Yeleen Beauty Makerspace, a co-manufacturing facility and tech hub built to lower the barriers to market entry for BIPOC beauty entrepreneurs; and a member of the Independent Beauty Association’s Board of Directors.