Making fashion fair for everyone

We’re excited to announce that we’re now an approved member of Fair Wear. That means we’re dedicated to supporting garment workers’ rights to safe, dignified and properly paid employment, and making fashion fair for everyone.

What is the Fair Wear Foundation?

The Fair Wear Foundation is a not-for-profit organisation that supports brands and suppliers to drive better working conditions for people working in factories all over the world.

Supply chains are complicated and interlinked. BAM – like most brands – doesn’t own its factories but while we might not be directly responsible for what happens in them, the way we work can have a big impact.

Fair Wear helps brands to understand their supply chain, impact and how they can influence change for the better. Fair Wear monitors how our suppliers are audited working to a code of conduct based on the ILO (International Labour Organization) convention on human rights.

There are a number of organisations that carry out this work. Before choosing Fair Wear, we reviewed each organisation’s approach to see which one would have the most profound impact on our supply chain.

Why Fair Wear?

We believe that ensuring good labour standards in our supply chain will come from establishing good longstanding trusting relationships.

This goes beyond a tick box exercise of complying with a list of requirements. So while Fair Wear will monitor our supplier audits, importantly, they will also assess us.

Fair Wear will assess BAM’s purchasing and working practices to ensure we are helping to create an environment that can support good working conditions. So much of this is about our influence and ensuring we use it for good.

A brand that consistently pushes for lower and lower prices can’t then be surprised that the factory can’t pay its workers a true living wage. How we work matters. Fair Wear will ensure we’re creating the right conditions for everyone in our supply chain to thrive.

What happens if Fair Wear identifies a problem in a factory?

Fair Wear will require us to work with the factory to resolve it. The simplest solution in these situations is to change supplier. But that won’t improve working conditions – we have to keep working with factories to support them to improve.

This process is transparent – every problem reported through Fair Wear’s complaints system is publicly reported.

Why now?

As a small business, we’ve been able to build very close relationships with our factories – you can see who we work with and our relationship with them in The people who make your clothes.

However, as we grow and the number of suppliers we work with increases, we recognise we won’t be able to have the same close relationships that we’ve previously enjoyed. We need to find a robust way to ensure that all the factories involved in making our clothes treat their workers fairly.

Does Fair Wear audit the whole supply chain?

At the moment, Fair Wear is focused on tier one garment factories. BAM’s goal is to be impact positive by 2030 and that means ensuring good working conditions for every person who is involved in making your clothes – right back to the growers of our bamboo. That’s what we plan to do – and we’ll be collaborating with Fair Wear to do it.