Sustainability / Ethical Sourcing
Ethical Sourcing covers all aspects of our supply chain and is our responsibility to ensure that at each touchpoint of the process, the rights of the workers involved and the environmental impacts are considered. We have a responsibility to our customers to ensure that we know where our goods are produced, who by and under what conditions.
The biggest impact we can have at Showpo is the impact we have on our supply chain as this is the core of our operation. This is the area our customers are most interested in and one that we feel we have the most responsibility to get right.
We will always be a fast fashion brand and have a long way to go on our sustainability journey in our supply chain. But to begin this work, our first step is to truly understand:
We’re proud of the relationships we’ve built with our suppliers over time. We don’t like to frequently change our suppliers but instead build meaningful long-term partnerships that allow us to grow together.
Over the past few years, we’ve done a lot of research into what Ethical Sourcing really means and how we can apply this to Showpo. There is a lot to learn in this space, namely understanding transparency and traceability, international human rights, risks, auditing and compliance.
We’ve always been a strong believer in visiting our factories and would have someone from the team visit bi-annually at minimum. Since the COVID-19 pandemic has changed this for us, it was important for us to develop a strategy that still aligned with these values and was not dictating from afar. As such, we’ve been gradually introducing our suppliers to our work here; allowing time for them to review this directly and work on strategies of their own alongside this.
We’ve focused on our Showpo Production for the remainder of this section. These are the factories we can impact directly and where we can drive the most impact. Our work here began with tracing the suppliers who produce our clothes. We have worked with our key factories for years, and have visited and met with them many times but we knew we had to go deeper. Showpo utilises a 4-Tier system for each stage of production based on industry standards:
Showpo’s current traceability focus has been our Tier 1 & Tier 2 suppliers. It has been imperative to focus on tracing 100% of our Tier 1 production suppliers as this is who we’ve built relationships with to date and where the majority of work on our products is done.
Showpo currently has our Tier 3 inputs purchased on behalf of Showpo by our suppliers, making it challenging to trace. As we move our focus to our Preferred Fibres, we will be working more with Tier 2 & 3 suppliers, increasing the percentage of traced suppliers in these tiers.
We plan to trace to Tier 3 for 80% of our production suppliers by 2025. We plan to trace to Tier 4 for at least one of our key suppliers by 2025.
Our in-house CSR team, alongside a third party Sustainability Consultant, has developed and refined our Code of Conduct and accompanying policies which apply to our suppliers, sub-contractors and third party facilities. We review this code and these policies annually, and share any updates with suppliers.
Showpo is currently working with our Tier 1 suppliers to communicate these Codes of Conduct with our Tier 2 suppliers.
We plan for 100% of our traced suppliers to have signed our Code of Conduct by EOY 2025.
With our Branded Partners, we also expect them to sign and uphold our Code, or we support mutual recognition where they have also implemented a similar code.
We have chosen to implement an annual audit program with our suppliers to measure and manage the ethical standards present in our factories. At this stage, this involves working with our suppliers to mutually recognise existing audits they may have or partnering with them on announced audits.
We’ve chosen SEDEX as our preferred standard of audit. SEDEX is an internationally recognised audit standard that most factories are familiar with. This standard also gives us the greatest level of detail in the results.
The auditing company visits the factory location on an agreed day and reviews the standards of the factory across a number of ethical, safety and compliance checkpoints. They then formulate an overall score for the location and also share details of any areas of concerns, these concerns are then summarised in what’s known as CAPs or Corrective Action Plans. Our factories are required to resolve any CAPs urgently depending on the severity of the issue, we work collaboratively with them to solve these.
We expect all of our suppliers to hold a current and valid audit with no open CAPs. Where our suppliers might not have done this in the past, we’ve worked with them to implement this into their processes. As always, progress over perfection is key here. We want to support our factories to work together to improve.Any new suppliers we onboard are expected to have these policies and audits in place already.
In line with our Modern Slavery policy, Showpo submitted a voluntary Modern Slavery Statement written in collaboration with an external consultant.
Showpo’s Modern Slavery risk assessment was taken in 2019 covering business operations, sourcing program, catagories, products sold and countries used for manufacturing. With this information, Showpo have developed a Modern Slavery Action Plan to continue our efforts towards the absence of Modern Slavery within Showpo practices. Our Modern Slavery risk assessments will become more comprehensive as we trace deeper into our supply chain.
Our suppliers are currently all located in the Guangzhou region of China.
In 2021, Showpo submitted to Baptist World Aid for their Ethical Fashion Report. The purpose of submitting was to get our journey started and in line with a reputable industry body. Through the process of developing our submission, we were able to begin developing our sustainability strategy and highlighting points of real impact. At Showpo, we are taking our time to learn, research and value progress over perfection. Our BWA submission was the gateway to our journey.