Supply chain

Our supplier list shares the details of our tier one suppliers and their manufacturing and processing factories accounting for 99% of the products we sell across our brands. As active participants of the Transparency Pledge we disclose details including the name, location, product type produced and number of workers employed by each supplier.

The list also includes the names and locations of tier two mills involved in making the majority of our product volume (71%). These 394 mills provide our suppliers with fabrics and yarns, including spinning, tanneries and fabric dyeing and printing. We aim to disclose 100% of the fabric dyeing and printing locations involve in making our products by the end of 2022.

The supplier information displayed on our list is updated monthly. When business needs occur, we onboard new suppliers or factories and occasionally we responsibly phase them out.

From raw materials to finished garment, our products pass through many different suppliers on their journey to our stores. These suppliers are arranged into several tiers to make our supply chain. Each tier does business with its immediately adjacent tiers.

Not all supply chains are the same and they can vary according to product type or materials used. Some of our supply chains are vertical – short with few tiers. Others can be horizontal and comprise several tiers.

• Tier 1 are the companies we do business with directly and work with product manufacture or processing.
• Companies working with component production and processing tend to fall into tiers 2 to 4.
• Raw material production can cover tiers 4 to 6.

• We do business with over 602 commercial product suppliers who manufacture products for our brands in over 1519 tier one factories in Europe, Asia and Africa.
• China and Bangladesh are the largest production markets for clothing.
• The European Union is the largest production market for our beauty assortment.
• Eight years is the global average length of our relationship with a supplier since 2006*, but some have been doing business with us for over 25 years.
• Around one and a half million people are employed by the supplier factories we work with. 63% of them are female and less than 1% are migrant workers.
• We operate 16 local production offices, employing over 2,000 colleagues who work daily with our suppliers. 
•  37% of tier one factories have trade union representation**.
• 967 factories reported that worker representatives are freely chosen by the workers**.

*Disclaimer: consecutive data only available from 2006
**Data validated by our country teams Dec 2021

Below you can download files about the share of women employed (Feb 2023) and trade union and worker representative data (Feb 2023) per supplier. These findings are based on self-assessed data from units on our Supplier List.

These are factories that are either owned or contracted by our suppliers to make our products. Normally, these are so called “cut and sew” factories where the final manufacturing takes place. One supplier can own or contract one or more factories. All of them are covered by our Sustainable Impact Partnership Programme developed to assess the sustainability performance of our suppliers and support their continuous improvement. Each of these factories report to us using the industry standard Higg Index Facility Environmental Module, and are now rolling out the most recent industry standard called Social and Labor Convergence Program (SLCP).

Not all factories possess the required facilities for making certain products – for example creating prints, washings or embroideries etc. In these cases, the suppliers can outsource specific tasks to so called processing factories. This is considered subcontracting and must be announced to H&M. We require that all processing factories are approved by our team. After approval, we approach the processing factory in the same way as any other factory making products for and include them in our SIPP. A processing factory is often contracted by more than one supplier. In some cases, one factory can be both a manufacturing factory and a processing factory. For example, when a manufacturing factory has certain production processes like in-house washing and offers this service to other manufacturing factories.

Fabric and yarn mills make fabrics and yarn and sell to our suppliers. We map/identify all fabric and yarn mills involved in our products in order to integrate them in our supplier assessment program, the Sustainability Impact Partnership Program (SIPP).

You can also find our suppliers on the Open Apparel Registry, an open-source tool that exists to improve human rights and environmental conditions in and around factories and facilities.