Earlier this month, it was announced that the Sustainable Furnishings Council’s key assets had been acquired by Cascale. The High Point, North Carolina–based SFC will continue in its current form through 2026, when it will be absorbed into the global nonprofit alliance’s larger operation, which has headquarters in Hong Kong and Amsterdam.

The SFC is known for its Wood Furniture Scorecard, a tool that evaluates and ranks companies based on their wood sourcing and manufacturing practices, and its Eco-Insight Assessment, which measures a company’s footprint in six areas: carbon use, health (of both the materials and the production environment), water usage, fair labor practices, waste reduction and circularity.

Scarlette Tapp, the SFC’s executive director, says that the organization had long been looking for ways to expand its operations, which have, until now, been focused on North American manufacturing. “The SFC has been around for 19 years, and we’ve been very steady in our efforts domestically, but part of our strategic plan has been to scale and have more of a global presence,” she explains. “If we were going to continue to move forward, we needed to go bigger.”

For its part, Cascale had been looking to fold home furnishings into its reach, as the organization (formerly called the Sustainable Apparel Coalition) wanted to move beyond its roots in the fashion industry. Founded by Patagonia and Walmart in 2009, Cascale is perhaps best known for creating the Higg Index, a suite of five tools that assess and measure the social and environmental performance of the consumer goods value chain and the environmental impact of products. Cascale has over 300 members globally, H&M, Amazon and Nike among them. SFC members include American home furnishings manufacturers like American Leather, Kravet and Hooker.

At the moment, 30 percent of the SFC’s members are interior designers. “Designers are this unique group, and we are excited to see where they are going to fit into the Cascale family, because their voice is extremely important,” says Tapp. “They are truly the teachers, the gatekeepers that are touching the end user. Home furnishings are different from apparel and footwear in that way. So we are excited to see how we can elevate [designers’] voices and get them on board.”

Tapp, who will stay on in her current role, sees access to the Higg Index as a major perk for SFC members. “Some of those tools can apply to what our manufacturers are already looking at, whether it’s factory practices or environmental impact and so forth, but hopefully there will be more of a furniture-specific tool eventually—that’s our hope for the near future,” she says. “Those metrics are going to be key [for] us as an industry globally, to truly reduce our carbon footprint.” She is hopeful that the SFC’s assessment tools will make it into Cascale’s member toolkit as well.

As with any transition, the finer points are still falling into place. “This just happened,” says Tapp. “It’s going to take some time, but we’re excited to move forward and see what’s on the other side.”