The Interface pilot that died so a new one could live

Somewhere in your company, there’s probably a circular economy initiative, such as a reusable packaging trial or a take-back program for used products, that quietly disappeared without an official end. It may still have someone’s name on it or even a budget line.

These zombie pilots, which never officially die but don’t keep living either, are common. A 2023 Accenture and SAP report on circular packaging reviewed 50 corporate announcements and updates about circular economy pilot programs from 2017 to 2023. Only two showed clear impact measurement and offered regular progress updates. Most went quiet after the launch announcement, offering no updates on whether they’d been canceled or what anyone learned.

Many pilots launch with shiny press releases and celebration. When they end, they slip quietly into the dark. But a pilot should be designed to end, and the ending deserves celebration, because that’s when a company takes stock of what it learned and what’s worth funding next. Few companies treat it that way.

I asked Liz Minné, head of global sustainability strategy at Interface, to share an example of a pilot the company had ended instead of scaling. She went back almost two decades, far enough to see what ending the program led to and how it informed future strategy.

A good story that didn’t sell

Minné told me about Fair-Works, a line of floor coverings that Interface made from grass, bamboo and other natural materials, sourced through artisan communities in India. The goal was to create a product with positive social impact that relied less on conventional materials. Fair-Works grew out of innovation workshops Interface ran in India in 2008. 

People were interested in the product, but they worried about durability and upkeep compared with the nylon carpet they already trusted. Interface sold Fair-Works on a small scale, and sales were disappointing. Interface’s own records don’t show exactly how long the product was on the market. The decision to end Fair-Works was made in consultation with teams across the business, based on sales, customer feedback and whether the product could scale. Customers liked the story behind the product, Minné said, but they weren’t willing to risk performance to buy it. The lesson she took from it is that sustainability innovation “has to solve the customer problem first.”

What ending the pilot made possible

Still, Fair-Works laid groundwork for the Interface team, teaching them what it would take to build supply chains with new community groups and NGOs. In 2012, the company put that experience into Net-Works, a circular economy partnership with the Zoological Society of London (ZSL) and Interface’s yarn supplier, Aquafil.

Through the initiative, fishing communities in the Philippines, and later Cameroon, sold discarded nylon nets for extra income, and Aquafil turned the nets into yarn for Interface carpet tiles. The nets gave Interface a new source of the post-consumer nylon it needed to raise the recycled content of its products.

According to Interface, Net-Works collected more than 224 metric tons of discarded fishing nets between 2012 and about 2020, when it became Coast 4C, a social enterprise that buys seaweed from small-scale farmers in the Philippines and helps them farm it sustainably and profitably. 

Interface no longer sources nets through Net-Works or Coast 4C, though Aquafil, its yarn partner in Net-Works, still sources reclaimed nets from other sources. Interface also used what it learned from Net-Works as a founding member of NextWave Plastics, a cross-industry consortium working to keep plastic out of the ocean and get it back into supply chains.

Why some pilots never die 

One reason that pilots limp on is sunk cost, the reluctance to walk away from what’s already spent. Sometimes teams get rearranged or employees leave and pilots are left floundering without ownership or direction.  

Other times, pilots drag along because they carry a public commitment and someone’s name. Stopping them feels like conceding the original idea was wrong. Minné sees it differently, and her advice is “not to confuse ending a pilot with failure.” End it on purpose, as Interface did, and carry what you learned into the next idea.

Even when a pilot is ended on purpose, though, the ending often stays quiet, and that may become more common: 63% of companies surveyed for Trellis’ 2026 State of the Sustainability Profession report have scaled back or rethought how they talk about sustainability.

When endings stay quiet, other teams lose the chance to learn from them. They may spend years repeating mistakes someone else already made. Interface is an exception. In its 2019 report Lessons for the Future, the company called Fair-Works “a market failure” and spelled out what it taught the team.

Where that leaves your pilot

If you’re running a pilot that isn’t scaling, a few questions can help separate a slow start from something that should end.

• What are you asking the customer to give up? If the answer is performance or price, scale will be an uphill fight however strong the impact case.
• Is the problem time or premise? Some systems, like take-back and reuse programs, take years to change habits, and ending them early can kill something that would have worked. Give it a set timeline, with room to adjust along the way. A product that doesn’t perform rarely gets better with patience. 
• What’s the opportunity cost? Each month a team spends propping up a stuck pilot is time it can’t spend on the next idea. Would that time be better spent elsewhere?
• What have you built that should outlast the pilot? What Interface learned building Fair-Works, such as how to source through artisan communities and work with NGOs and other new partners, outlived the product. 

It also makes sense to set the exit terms before you launch. Agreeing up front on what results would end a pilot makes the call less personal when it comes.

Minné’s closing advice is to stay focused “on the problem you’re trying to solve, not on the pilot itself.” 

Treat a pilot’s ending as a result, and share the core lessons where you can, publicly if possible, or in a peer group or an industry coalition, so the next team doesn’t have to learn them alone.