Sourcing from Myanmar

Our first priority is the safety and wellbeing of the people who make our products and we take our responsibility towards them very seriously.

Last September, following the publication of the Ethical Trade Initiative (ETI)’s independent assessment on responsible business conduct within Myanmar, we took the difficult decision to begin working towards a responsible exit from the country. These independent findings confirmed we could no longer ensure the high ethical standards we insist upon to protect the safety and rights of the people who make our products.

We’ve been working through our responsible exit plan in consultation with our partners and stakeholders in Myanmar and globally, following the UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights and ACT’s responsible exit guidelines. Additionally, alongside other brands, we worked closely with IndustriALL to create a framework for responsible business disengagement. This framework sets the pace for our responsible exit from Myanmar as agreed with IndustriALL. To the extent that has been possible during the exit process, we have been working closely with factories, suppliers, trade unions, basic labour organisations and project partners to remediate any issues that arise during our exit period and, where possible, build capacity for the factories’ management and mitigate the impact to the workers in our suppliers’ factories. We stopped placing new orders in October 2022 and expect our final orders to ship before the end of the year.

Since our announcement to stop sourcing from Myanmar, we’ve doubled the size of our Ethical Trade team on the ground enabling more frequent visits to our suppliers' factories to give us improved visibility. We continue to fully investigate and, where possible, remediate any allegations we are made aware of, where possible. The safety of our team and that of the workers in our suppliers’ factories remains our priority throughout.