Outland Denim last week released its first annual sustainability report. Here, founding CEO James Bartle discusses what was involved in creating the report.
When someone purchases from us at Outland Denim, they aren’t just buying a pair of jeans, they are making an investment in positive change; taking us up on our promise to create impact on their behalf.
And so just like we report to your shareholders, it's our obligation and privilege to report to our customers the incredible impact their purchases have had.
We want them to come along on the journey with us [and so] we released the first annual Outland Denim Sustainability Report for the period June '19 to July '20.
The report, headed by both our Impact and Marketing teams, was born out of a desire to create a central benchmark document reflecting our social and environmental impact and future goals, and also to communicate this to our customers.
Highlights include 750 people, including staff and household members have benefited from stable employment with Outland Denim’s unique social enterprise business model, and that 85% of formerly at-risk staff report a reduced level of risk to exploitation after six months of employment at Outland Denim.
It was important to us that the report be broken into social, environmental, and economic to reflect our definition of sustainability.
While it might seem illogical to discuss sales and finance in a sustainability report, it’s my belief that economics can’t be separated from sustainability; that business needs to put its money where its mouth is, and that’s what we strive to do at Outland Denim.
Over a period of approximately a month and a half, our team collated the report focusing on areas of impact that are most important to us as a brand, to our customers, and to the current fashion industry conversation, while also taking guidance from criteria of third party partnerships such as the Global Sustainable Development Goals, the Ellen MacArthur Jeans Redesign Project, and the B Corporation B Lab assessment.
The data that you'll find in the report was collated from a range of internal sources (such as interviews with our team in Cambodia), partners sources (such as HATCH who measure, manage and communicate impact in areas in this report such as supply chain transparency), and third party sources (such as Jeanelogia whose Environmental Impact Measurement scores feature throughout the water, energy, and chemical pages of the report).
We recognise that we are not perfect. It is to be expected that we will fall short of the ideal.
However, we are committed to making continual improvements and are always seeking to do better, to push forward, and plough new ground.
Our benchmark sustainability report represented a welcome chance for our leadership team to stop and reset a new agenda for our company and our brand going forward.
The result is the 'good', 'better', and 'best' tiered goals found within the report.
In 2020 customers want and deserve transparency from brands in order to build trust.
We hope that our customers read this report and have hope that despite the challenges COVID-19 has presented to the world, purpose-driven-business is the way forward.