Tyler Brooks

If your responsible sourcing program lives in spreadsheets and is owned by a team stuck in a silo, it isn't really a program at all. It's just risk that hasn't caught up with you yet. That gap is where most of my career has lived. I built 4imprint's responsible sourcing function from the ground up, drawing on experience from Target to create something that fit the business. What I'm most proud of isn't any single deliverable. It's that responsible sourcing is now embedded in how the organization operates, with cross-functional teams incorporating supplier origin and performance into their decision making reflexively. They engage me because it strengthens their work, not because they're required to. I bring that same mindset to the people I lead directly. That means giving the people on my team real ownership, pushing them outside their comfort zone, and trusting them to rise to it. Watching people exceed what they thought they were capable of never gets old. On the technology side, I saw a gap, made a case for fixing it, secured the investment to do it right, and took a calculated bet on an emerging startup after running a proper pilot. I got deeply involved in shaping how the platform actually works, the user experience, what gets flagged and when, and how different pieces connect. It's now being adopted by cross-functional teams and some of our largest suppliers, who see it as a way out of spreadsheets and into something built for how modern work actually gets done. The supplier scorecard started the same way, with a gap nobody had thought to close yet. It grades suppliers on objective metrics, makes their results visible to them directly, and gives them something concrete to act on. Suppliers now know what levers to pull to improve their standing and many are pulling them. Getting suppliers to genuinely care about responsible sourcing is one of the harder problems in this field. Turns out transparency and a little healthy competition go a long way. I stay connected to the broader industry through panels, peer conversations, and speaking engagements, in English and Mandarin. This space moves fast, and humility about what you don't know yet is part of the job. Outside of work I'm competitive by nature, train harder than I probably need to, and have yet to find a challenge I didn't want to try at least once. Deepening my Mandarin has been one of the more rewarding things I've done in recent years, a nod to both my roots and my work. Some things are worth the effort even when they're humbling.