Our appetite for Fast Fashion is insatiable. Over half of the clothes we buy on the UK high street we’re made in very low income countries with workers paid as little as 13p per hour. Often those workers are effectively modern day slaves with many being children.
And yet according to a recent poll 7 in 10 of us want to know that our clothes have been manufactured for a fair wage and without use of slave labour. Many of us will now adjust our buying habits towards brands that can show their clothes are “ethically sourced”. So how does an emerging Fast Fashion retailer prove that every garmemt it sells has followed an ethical sourcing policy and process?
This was the challenge we set a team of business students from Edinburgh Napier Uni who worked with us to explore how our Okuda process compliance tool could be used to model and control an ethical sourcing process for an emerging brand specialising in trendy high quality green and ethical boxer shorts. The team were able to research the process needed and create a process flow that could then be built in our no code tool allowing any retailer to demonstrate compliance with an ethical sourcing policy – from sourcing raw materials, through manufacturing and into the retail supply chain. Once implemented this process would allow any fashion brand to demonstrate across their whole product range that each step of their sourcing process their policy is being applied consistently with the data and evidence to back it up.
If you’d like to find out more about building, monitoring and complying with ethical sourcing processes we’d love to chat.