05-01-2022
Sustainability always comes first at HAKRO. That is why we are continuously working on further developing our entire supply chain and making it even more sustainable. Together with the clothing company OLYMP Bezner KG, we have developed a comprehensive audit programme as part of our corporate due diligence, which will serve as the basis for our sustainability management along the entire supply chain.
"The growing challenges within global supply chains can be solved much better together, which is why it pays to leave familiar patterns of thinking sometimes and join forces in cooperations. Especially if you want to make a big impact in the process," says Carmen Kroll, HAKRO Managing Director. How will clothing brands succeed even better in the future in developing their global production operations sustainably and using audits as part of their corporate duty of care less as a monitoring tool and more as a basis for sustainability management? "Our teams first defined what requirements an audit must fulfil for us. Together with ELEVATE Ltd. in Hong Kong, one of the world's leading providers of sustainability and supply chain services, we then developed our audit programme in a nine-month process," says Jochen Schmidt, Head of the team Quality, Values & Sustainability at HAKRO.
As two of the approximately 140 members of the multi-stakeholder initiative Fair Wear Foundation, both HAKRO and OLYMP are among the clothing brands that have committed to ensuring fair working conditions in the textile industry. "That's why it was important to us from the very beginning to also involve the experts from the Fair Wear Foundation in the development process and to incorporate their valuable suggestions into the audit programme," reports Jochen Schmidt. The result: a joint audit programme called "iMPACT Program". The acronym iMPACT is formed from the English terms "Insight", "Motivation", "Partnership", "Action", "Capacity Building" and "Transparancy", which characterise the principles of the programme.
The iMPACT Programme focuses on the people within the supply chain, provides honest and in-depth insights into production conditions and aims to motivate partner companies and clients alike to act together in partnership, to develop competencies in safeguarding social standards and to ensure the highest possible transparency. In this way, the iMPACT programme creates the basis for continuous development in partnership with the aim of actively improving the situation of people in the supply chain. To this end, employees within the production site are also included in evaluation processes so that any problems can be identified directly and improvements can be made effectively. For the future, we aim to make our jointly developed iMPACT PROGRAM available to other companies in the textile and garment sector.
