Throughout the history of mercantile enterprise, the measure of business success has long been the accumulation of wealth, the expansion of market influence, and the relentless pursuit of profit or returns on investments (ROIs). Usually, some business leaders venture into philanthropy, using accumulated wealth to support causes after they achieve these commercial goals.
Yet few measure success solely by their positive impact on people’s lives. Jacalyn Bennett – the founder of a successful fashion design, product development and manufacturing company in the USA and internationally – is one of them.
Despite its influence and reach in human affairs, business has yet to fully align with social progress. Granted, environmental, social, and governance (ESG) considerations are fast becoming boardroom concerns, but enterprises remain focused on profit maximization. CSR is mostly good PR. Rarely has a commercial enterprise deviated from this script, and the question remains: Can business be purely for goodness’ sake, and can individuals build successful careers driven by the need to do good?
Bennett believes so and has done just that for over four decades.
Her approach stands apart from the typical corporate social responsibility model. Rather than treating ethics and sustainability as peripheral concerns, she integrates them into production, employment practices, and supply chain decisions.
She is not alone in this. There are others like her, like Sri Lanka’s late Dr A. T. Ariyaratna, the founder of the Sarvodaya Shramadana Movement, who demonstrated how self-reliance and collective action could spur economic and social transformation among vulnerable groups. Yet such figures remain exceptions rather than the rule.
A Different ROI
Bennett’s career began conventionally enough. She trained as a designer and gained industry recognition. By the late 1970s, her work had been featured in newspapers, magazines, and fashion shows. Yet she was uninterested in the glamour that often accompanied success in the fashion industry.
While designing for a multinational clothing brand, such as The Limited, she continued her volunteer work domestically and internationally, particularly with domestic violence survivors and in marginalized communities. She observed that employment was often the difference between dependence and self-sufficiency. This realization shaped her understanding of fashion as a vehicle for economic agency—not merely for the good of consumers but as a tool for poverty alleviation.
Her exposure to India’s cottage industries, where artisans practised intricate hand-block printing and embroidery, reinforced this perspective. The skill was there, but stable work was not. Many workers were trapped in informal arrangements, lacking bargaining power and protections. These realities shaped her later focus on sustainable employment over charitable giving.
In 1976, she joined Mast Industries, the manufacturing arm of The Limited, at the request of the late Martin Trust, known as the father of Sri Lanka’s modern apparel industry. At the time, Sri Lanka was not yet an established sourcing hub. Trust believed it could become one, and Bennett was sent as a Designer to explore its potential.
Her early work involved developing cottage industry production models, where small workshops operated out of homes. These networks were essential in Sri Lanka’s transition into mass garment manufacturing. Yet, while production scaled, worker welfare lagged. Nutrition, hygiene, and safety standards were low.
Unlike most executives in similar roles, Bennett did not treat these conditions as external to the business. She initiated small but effective interventions—giving her own money to provide for food, improving sanitation, and teaching skill sets in patternmaking and sewing. This, in turn, educated the workers, which allowed her to advocate for better wages. These were not acts of charity. In her view, they were prerequisites for an efficient and sustainable industry. Workers who are malnourished, working in unsafe or unclean conditions, and without the correct skill sets never meet the long-term needs of global brands.
The Sarvodaya Moment
By the early 1980s, her role in Sri Lanka had expanded, overseeing product development and operations, resulting in improving sewing quality not only in Sri Lanka but also in the eight other countries she managed for Mast Industries. Yet she was increasingly disillusioned by the limits of corporate responsibility and its impact on improving people’s lives.
Companies could set standards, but local factories often failed to implement them. Exploitation persisted under the guise of cost efficiency, even today, although Sri Lanka has moved up the clothing manufacturing value chain.
She considered forsaking the fashion industry to focus on humanitarian work. During this period, she met Dr A. T. Ariyaratne, founder of the Sarvodaya Shramadana Movement. Sarvodaya operated on the principle that communities could lift themselves through self-governance and cooperative development.
Dr Ariyaratne and Bennett agreed that business and social change could be integrated. Rather than abandoning her career in the apparel industry, Bennett was better positioned to drive reform from within. While walking away to continue her volunteer work might ease personal frustrations, staying could change conditions for thousands of workers. Bennett’s lifelong commitment has been to provide jobs for as many people as possible.
If systemic change is possible, industry players will need to create evolved principles and standards with a radical viewpoint that will treat the entirety of their team as they expect to be treated.
“Meeting Dr. Ariyaratne was a pivotal moment for me, especially as my father had passed away when I was 19. I was 24 when I met Dr. Ari, and it felt as though my father had returned in his form,” Bennett explains.
“My father, too, believed strongly in equality and justice, and much of his legal work was pro bono, especially helping people of colour in the 1950s and 1960s when they were often marginalized and denied representation. These beliefs shaped my upbringing and are the values I found in Dr. Ariyaratne. My father taught me a valuable lesson when I was a child. He said: if you have 25 cents, you can give 20 cents away to help others and keep five cents for yourself. ” You can do great things with a small amount of money he explained to me when I was just five years old. It doesn’t matter how rich you are; what matters is that you can always give to make a difference”.
At a young age, Bennett was committed to sharing her knowledge and abilities through education and helping others. In the second grade, her teachers guided her to teach painting to the terminally ill children at the Cony Island Hospital in New York City.
The next phase of Bennett’s journey was philosophy in action.
Business for a Higher Purpose
Subsequent to my designing for The Limited, in 1984 I was approached by the executives of The Limited and the presidents of Victoria’s Secret, who asked me to start my own company to work on their emerging lingerie company, which they had recently acquired. She founded Bennett and Company in 1984, a rare female-led intimate apparel firm. From its inception, it operated on principles that would later be labelled “sustainable” and “ethical”—though, at the time, they were simply practical. Bennett explained that it was a test: She wanted to see if practising and working with kindness would be a successful business model. “If people could work cooperatively as a team, we could work as a team in a company organization. That means we could work together in our communities, in our countries and our world would benefit by this example,” Bennett says, adding, ” Peace could be achieved by creating economic interdependence between countries, and I have always been hopeful that the work that I am doing would create a strong economy amongst the countries that I work in.” Rather than prioritizing short-term cost reduction, she created a business model that placed worker welfare, fair employment, and sustainable supply chains at the centre. She held her factories to higher safety and hygiene standards than regulatory requirements, ensuring workers operated in conditions that prioritized their well-being. She also structured employment for stability and career progression, particularly for women who often found themselves in vulnerable working arrangements.
Jacalyn Bennett, Founder of Bennett and Company and lifelong Sarvodaya Collaborator
She launched Sati Creations in Sri Lanka, a programme that employed young mothers from the Sarvodaya Suwasetha women’s shelter. This ensured financial independence for women otherwise excluded from formal employment. After the tsunami, she also purchased sewing machines and trained the women in every household of an eco-village Sarvodaya had built in south Sri Lanka.
Her corporate sustainability initiatives also set her apart. She developed the award-winning Bennett Online Technology (BOLT), a system that tracked garments from design through all aspects of production, reducing waste and maintaining quality consistency.
Beyond Fashion: Education, Mindfulness, and Community Investment
Bennett’s impact extended into education and wellness initiatives. She established the Insight Meditation Centre of Newburyport, integrating mindfulness practices into business leadership. She funded wellness spaces at Newburyport Public Schools and Anna Jaques Hospital, embedding well-being and mindfulness into professional, health and educational environments. She was the first to invest in and support building Sarvodaya’s Vishva Niketan Mediation Centre.
Her investment in youth development included scholarships for students at the Fashion Institute of Technology, Northern Essex Community College and others. She also developed a youth sewing programme at the Boys and Girls Club, introducing technical skills to children to bridge the gap between education and industry.
She remains a longtime partner and benefactor of Omega Institute’s Women’s Studies in New York, the Sarvodaya Women’s Movement, supporting the educational training programmes that offer financial independence to women in at-risk communities and approximately 30+ other global organizations, including The Ireland Funds
All these were possible because she decided to build a business dictated by her values. Today, Bennett and Company has designed and produced over 1.5 million styles across daywear, lingerie, sleepwear, and related categories. Its operations span from its design and product development studios in New England to its manufacturing facilities in Guangzhou, China, at the request of Victoria’s Secret. The company integrates design, sourcing, and production within a structured supply chain. It maintains a physical archive of over 40 years of garments, providing sustainability to its design teams to reference, leverage and revitalize past styles. It develops custom fabrics, engineered embroideries, laces, and brocades to meet client specifications.
Bennett and Company sources 95% of its materials from Asia, optimizing costs and production timelines while working with suppliers that comply with its ethical and environmental requirements. Bennett and Company is Victoria’s Secret’s longest-standing premium partner, providing design and manufacturing services with their long-term collaborative relationship.
An Antidote for Apathy
Despite her success, Bennett remains critical of how little has changed at scale. Ethical production models exist, but they stay niche. Large corporations prioritize short-term cost efficiency over long-term sustainability, treating factory workers as expendable rather than essential to the supply chain success.
She has observed that the wealthiest have the greatest means to drive reform but often do the least. Many businesses rely on outsourced ethics, subcontracting production to facilities with little oversight. Consumers may be more aware of labour exploitation, yet fast fashion and cost-driven purchasing habits persist.
Her view is pragmatic. Regulation alone is insufficient—without internal corporate reform, compliance standards will always have loopholes. Sustainability must become integrated into business structures rather than positioned as a branding strategy. Companies that use ethical practices for marketing rather than operational change will not create a lasting impact.
Over the decades, Bennett has received many awards, including being the youngest recipient of the Mortimer C. Ritter Lifetime Achievement Award and recognition from the Sarvodaya Vishvamitra Movement. Yet she downplays personal accolades, maintaining that success is measured by positive systemic impact rather than individual recognition.
To claim that Bennett’s legacy offers a test case for ethical capitalism may be misleading because it transcends all that. Bennett’s is a test case for a spirituality-based (as opposed to religiosity) lifestyle that does not distinguish between public, work, or personal life in one’s self and does not in any form discriminate against others, as she believes everything and everyone is interconnected in a global manifestation of oneness.
She has demonstrated that integrating fair wages, sustainability, and responsible supply chain management is possible and commercially viable. Yet her experience also underscores how rare such models remain and deserve to be replicated.
Her work poses a challenge: If businesses can function with ethical principles, why don’t they? Jacalyn Bennett is not the first to ask this question, nor will she be the last. Whether it lies in corporate inertia, consumer behaviour, or broader economic structures remains unresolved. It is clear that without more leaders like her, business will continue to lag behind its potential to serve a wider social purpose.
Another question. How hard is it for Bennett and Company to engage with suppliers and clients, focusing only on costs, let alone profit maximization? “When positive energy and gratitude are applied, anything and everything is possible. ” Bennett says reassuringly, adding, “We do not work with anyone who does not respect our philosophy of work-life principles”.
However, Bennett remains troubled by how few people see success as a means to give back. “What saddens me the most is why wealthy people don’t help their own country,” she says. “Why don’t the rich come forward and support their nation? If groups of wealthy people gathered to give back, it could make huge positive differences in our world economies. I plan to start an additional factory in Vietnam that will operate on the same principles my China factory follows, which are also based on Sarvodaya principles.”
She explains that her Chinese factory was built not just for efficiency but also for dignity. It reflected the culture of the people working there, incorporating art and thoughtful details that reinforced a sense of belonging.
She sees the lack of consideration for workers in the most minor details. “Something as simple as ensuring all team members have soap and towels in the bathrooms makes a huge difference on a multitude of levels through the health, hygiene, and cleanliness of the factory and the garments being manufactured there. These small things reveal whether workers are treated with awareness, appreciation, and respect.”
Bennett believes that all beings are capable of doing more. “If they were to assume more responsibility to help do good for others, the ROI would be a heartfelt experience, as it has been for me and my global team,” she explains. “We love what we create because it is of the heart. If we become part of a larger organization, we would be able to bring about more positive change in our world for more people. My intention is that my life’s purpose is to be of service to other human beings”.
The question will continue for humans: can business be purely for goodness’ sake, and can individuals build successful careers driven by the need to do good? Perhaps the question needs to change because of Bennett and others like her: not whether an ethical business is possible, but why so few pursue it. And whether the obligation to give back in a world where wealth is concentrated in fewer hands will ever outweigh the inertia of self-interest. For Bennett, there is no doubt. Individuals, whatever their circumstances, do great things motivated by kindness. Change for good, after all, starts from within, with awareness and action.