Supply chain

Our supply chain is complex and our products can pass through many suppliers on their journey from raw materials to finished product. Like most clothing brands, we don’t own any factories. Instead we work with independent manufacturers. To increase transparency, we first published our supplier list in 2013. Since then we have continued to disclose more and more information. 

• We do business with over 574 commercial product suppliers who manufacture products for our brands in over 1,027 tier 1 factories in Europe, Asia and North America.¹ 
• China and Bangladesh are the largest production markets for clothing.
• The European Union is the largest production market for our beauty assortment.
• Average length of a supplier relationship is 9 years, but we have been doing business with some for over 21 years.²
• Around 1.4 million people are employed by the supplier factories we work with, 63% of them are female.³
• Around 0.16% of workers in our tier 1 and 2 factories are migrants.
• We operate 15 local production offices, employing over 1,600 colleagues who work with our suppliers daily. 
• 37% of tier one factories have trade union representation.^{4, 5}
• 1096 factories reported that worker representatives are freely chosen by the workers.⁴

Our supplier list discloses the details of our tier 1 suppliers and their manufacturing and processing factories, accounting for 99% of the products we sell.

The list also includes the names and locations of tier 2 mills that provide our suppliers with fabric, including tanneries and fabric dyeing and printing. We are working towards disclosing 100% of the fabric dyeing and printing locations involved in making our products.¹
As participants of the Transparency Pledge we share the name, address, product type produced and number of workers employed at the factories. We also publish how long we have been working with the supplier, percentage of female workers, number of elected worker representatives and trade union presence.

We update this supplier list monthly.⁶

We onboard new suppliers or factories and, occasionally, phase them out according to our business needs. When this happens we follow the ACT Responsible Exit Policy, which details how to exit a supplier relationship with minimal impact. Read more on our Responsible purchasing practices page.

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

From raw materials to finished item, 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.

¹ Figure correct as of December 2023. See our Sustainability Disclosure.
² Consecutive data only available from 2006.
³ Figure correct as of December 2023. See our Sustainability Disclosure.
⁴ Verified SLCP data from 2023.
⁵ Figure correct as of December 2023. See our Sustainability Disclosure.
⁶ Trade union data collected by industry assessment tools and updated yearly.