In 2012, Matt Scanlan, the founder and chief executive officer of Naadam Cashmere, was just a young New York University alumnus with an unsatisfying job at a venture capital firm. "After a couple years of working as an analyst - which is a pretty thankless job - I left," he says. "A week after I quit, I booked a flight" to Ulaanbaatar, the capital city of Mongolia, to visit a college friend who lived in the region. The two of them met a newspaper reporter who hailed from Scanlan's hometown of Westport, Conn., and soon happened to hit it off with a couple of the reporter's sources, nomadic goat herders."

How fast is fast enough when it comes to clothes and gratification? How much do you really need that dress or bag or platform sandal?

Wal-Mart Stores Inc., long known for squeezing its suppliers on prices, is now pressuring companies including Unilever and Colgate-Palmolive Co. to help the world's biggest retailer remove a billion metric tons of greenhouse gas emissions from its supply chain by 2030.

Wal-Mart Stores Inc.'s fight to defend its low-cost reputation is helping to extend the longest food-price decline in decades.