Strategy as practice (SAP) research has made great progress focusing on practice, praxis, or practitioners’ settings where strategy prevails, but less is known about how strategy emerges at the very origins where it is still non-existent and only imminent. The purpose of this paper is to advance insights into strategy origins by exploring and examining what antecedents regarding activities, actors and sensemaking are involved in the integration of sustainability into strategy. The fashion and apparel industry serves as a suitable setting as sustainability strategy development is imminent but neither strategy activities nor their context, including practices, actors, cognitions, etc. or outcomes are predetermined. Drawing on an inductive qualitative multiple-case pilot study, we reveal an intricate interrelationship between the doings and thinkings of strategy. We develop a framework showing two alternative strategizing sensemaking logics – the orienteering logic and the exploring logic – and their underlying mechanisms of sustainability initiative development. First, we contribute by providing a nuanced understanding of the interactive mechanisms between sensemaking and activity and thus add insights into the action side of action-meaning cycles in sensemaking and how people generate meanings based on actions and engagements. Second, moving beyond the prior interpretivist and cognitivist emphasis we unveil how ‘things’ become strategic and how diverse strands of activities and actors rely on strategic intent and limited or no intent with implications for strategy outcome. Third, we contribute to recent dialogues on how strategy research remains relevant considering global grand challenges.
