What we stand for

The social engagement of companies and corporate citizenship has become quite fashionable these days. We’re thrilled to see this happening as it has been our true belief all along that if you take from the world, you’ve got to give back.

In early 1990 we started the Eco Desk, Esprit’s environmental and social affairs department. A company-wide “eco-audit” programme was initiated to incorporate ecological consideration into daily business decisions. A lecture series established a regular forum to educate employees. In the same year, Esprit embraced a new mission statement: Be Informed, Be Involved, Make a Difference. Due to the new motto, designers started to look beyond the surface of fashion and discovered the social and environmental impacts of apparel manufacturing. As a result, Ecollection by Esprit was born — a line of socially and environmentally responsible clothing. And once the seed was sown it went on growing.

Today we believe that our long-term profitability, brand reputation and customer loyalty depend on our commitment to deliver unsurpassed value to our stakeholders — while voluntarily conducting our business in a way that advances ethical and legal expectations, lessens our impact on the environment, and provides high quality of life for our customers and employees. When buying goods from developing countries and emerging markets, we select our suppliers carefully and monitor them on an ongoing basis — assuring that they share our commitments to a higher standard.

We realised that socially responsible production conditions can only be achieved by joint efforts with our business partners as well as our suppliers, and so we became a member of the Business Social Compliance Initiative (BSCI) which was founded by the EU Foreign Trade Association in Brussels. BSCI provides a common platform and monitoring system for members with various Codes of Conduct in different countries. In 2006, we were selected as a representative member to sit on BSCI Members’ Board to develop long-term planning and make strategic decisions.

Following the BSCI guidelines and our corporate compliance objectives, we have built our comprehensive compliance programme to identify roles and responsibilities among parties in our supply chain, from our most substantial concerns to our minimum compliance standards.

In 2007, we applied our compliance programme to all our suppliers in all production countries. According to our compliance policy, we require our suppliers to comply with not only the BSCI requirements, but also local environmental ordinances and foreign trade regulations.

We require all our staff and suppliers, including their corresponding subcontractors, to comply with BSCI requirements which are based on the following: ILO Core Labor Conventions, United Nations Conventions on children’s rights, United Nations Conventions to eliminate all forms of discrimination, the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights and some basic environmental requirements. We terminate our business relationship immediately with any suppliers who are identified as having critical violations against these requirements.

We aim to create a stronger link between our suppliers’ compliance performances and our purchase decisions — relying on corporate social responsibility reports detailing each supplier’s performance and ensuring their compliance with our standards. In order to assure continuous improvement in the future, we map out all manufacturers — and their performance reports — in our supplier management system.