Goals and progress
Supply chain | Our program in action
Purchasing practices
Location: United Kingdom, South Asia and the United States
Summary: How does an order for dresses affect the life of a garment worker in a factory thousands of miles away? Taking a closer look at purchasing practices offers insights into how we can improve working conditions through internal decision-making.
Over the last five years, we have deepened our understanding of how working conditions in the factories that make our clothes are affected by customers’ desire for on-trend fashion at a value and by our own purchasing practices. Our purchasing practices include all activities in which we interact with factories — from the clothing samples we order during the product design process to how quickly we expect factories to ship finished clothes.
For help with this research, we began partnering with the Ethical Trading Initiative (ETI) and Women Working Worldwide (WWW) in 2004. ETI is a tripartite alliance of companies, NGOs, and trade union organizations working together to identify and promote ethical trade. WWW is a non-governmental organization based in the United Kingdom that works on issues of worker rights in the garment supply chain. It has published research on how poor, inefficient decision-making by apparel companies can have a negative impact on factory working conditions.
In 2006, we collaborated with ETI and invited WWW researchers to interview key Gap Inc. employees at company headquarters and one of our major sourcing hubs, as well as factory management and workers. Various workers groups and other civil society stakeholders active in the Gap Inc. supply chain also contributed to these efforts. A number of recommendations to improve purchasing practices emerged, including:
Developing better systems to address situations in which factories don’t have enough time to complete production orders due to shorter lead times or various raw material delays.
Helping both internal staff and factory management improve production planning to meet demands in a timely and ethical manner.
“In today’s challenging global economic environment, it is imperative for companies to consider the impact of their own decision-making on working conditions in their supply chains,” says Lakshmi Bhatia, Gap Inc.’s director of Global Partnerships. She has been working closely with WWW since the project’s inception and chairs the Purchasing Practices Working Group at the ETI. “This understanding will eventually enable all critical actors in the supply chain to consistently make the right decisions for their products, as well as for the people producing them.”
In 2008, we began a pilot program to gather and analyze data, which detailed opportunities for improving our design, production and planning processes. We plan to train our teams on these findings, beginning with Gap brand in 2009. We’re currently determining locations, refining our scope and scheduling a launch date for the training.
We also made a significant organizational change in 2008 — moving the management of the Gap Inc. Retail Academy under Dan Henkle, the senior vice president of Global Responsibility. The Retail Academy provides core training curriculum to the company’s product teams, including Merchandising and Inventory Management. Dan is currently working with the Retail Academy to embed social responsibility training into its programs, which include purchasing practices.
