Bestseller aims for transparency in supply chain

Danish fashion group Bestseller wants to fulfill its transparency pledge and starting from this year, make information about its supplier factories, which amount to around 800 manufacturing sites in Europa and Asia, available to the public.

"Bestseller will begin the process of making information about our supplier factories available in 2017," confirmed sustainability manager Katrine Milman according to Fibre2Fashion. "We are already now sharing various supplier related information with the Bangladesh Accord and other external business partners, and we are now looking forward to getting further into the process of making more information publicly available down the road."

"We continuously work to obtain transparency in our supply chain and make positive changes. We expect the supplier factory information to be presented as a consolidated list of factory names that deliver to brands and sub-brands under the Bestseller A/S umbrella," added Milman.

After a coalition of labour and human rights groups had asked 72 leading fashion companies to agree to implement a simple Transparency Pledge (see the publication "Follow the Thread"), Bestseller pledged to start publishing information about its supplier factories from 2017 onward. The fashion group's latest comments are the first concrete statement after the pledge.

However, Bestseller has to walk the talk now and publish a list that contains the supplier details specified by the coalition: the name of each cut-make-trim (CMT) factory, its street address, number of workers, product types and categories and the frequency with which this information is going to be published.

Bestseller does not have its own factories but works with suppliers who are willing to meet the commitments of its code of conduct and chemical restrictions. More than 20 individual brands, among them Jack & Jones, Vero Moda and Only, are part of Bestseller and produce around 250 million products annually at more than 800 factories in Europe and Asia. Worldwide, Bestseller brands are available at more than 2,700 chain stores and at around 15,000 multi brand retailers and department stores.

Photo: Bestseller website