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Ethical Sourcing
We think about the whole White Stuff world – that’s over 135 factories across 12 countries (Bangladesh, Cambodia, China, India, Italy, Nepal, the Philippines, Portugal, Tunisia, Turkey, the United Kingdom and Vietnam) and 58,000 workers.
We believe in doing good stuff and that means looking after our people. We don't tolerate poor working conditions or people being treated unfairly, if we find people in any part of our supply chain working in these conditions, we will take action to help resolve issues in a fair and responsible way.
How do we check?
We have our very own White Stuff auditors who have been specially trained to our White Stuff methodology. They audit our factories regularly to make sure the conditions are safe for our workers, ensuring they are being treated fairly and paid correctly.
What do we check?
Our Code of Conduct, (which you can download here) informs the factory managers and workers of the standards we expect to find. To make sure this is really clear we have had it translated into the languages of each of the countries where our products are made. Our auditors ensure that it is displayed on notice boards for the workers to see. All our suppliers are required to demonstrate compliance to our Code of conduct.
It's not just about looking around the factories, it's also about talking to the workers. By creating conversations with the workers in our supply chain we can delve deeper and find out how happy they are in their workplace. It is through these conversations, we are getting a deeper insight into how they are being treated and crucially if conditions have improved when we go back and visit.
In addition we have been working with key suppliers to keep ethical sourcing at the heart of what they do. We have engaged directly with workers and held training sessions to raise awareness of their rights and in turn our factories have committed to make continual improvements.
Collaboration
We've been members of the Ethical Trading Initiative since 2013 - an organisation that brings together retailers and other organisations to share learnings, join projects and work closely on supply chain initiatives.
What next?
We have checked the conditions of all the factories who directly manufacture our White Stuff products. Now we are starting to look further down the supply chain at the fabric mills, printers and dyers. We need to ensure that they too have good ethical practices and those practices are sustainable.
Textiles (fabric) makes up 80% of the product we sell and the workers in these factories are very important to us.
