Our supply chain is where most of our environmental and social risks occur – and where we can work with our partners to address them.
We manage these risks through our supply chain management approach, which includes setting clear requirements for suppliers and monitoring how they are met. Our Factory Standards Programme is a key part of this work. It is our main tool for assessing factories, understanding working conditions and environmental practices, and identifying where improvements are needed.
All production units are assessed regularly through audits, on-site visits and dialogue with suppliers. The aim is not only to verify compliance with our standards, but to support continuous improvement over time.
Our Factory Standards Programme
The Factory Standards Programme is BESTSELLER's primary tool for ensuring that tiers 0 and 1 meet our social, labour, environmental, and chemical requirements. All approved production units (tier 1 factories) participate in this programme, which includes regular assessments conducted by our in-country teams or third-party auditors.
Key components of the programme
Compliance verification and onsite visits at the factories are part of how we implement our Factory Standards Programme.
1 – Compliance verification
Assessments confirm adherence to BESTSELLER’s Code of Conduct, human rights supply chain policies, and environmental management requirements.
2 – Continuous quality assurance
The process involves documentation reviews, worker interviews, and on-site visits, ensuring a comprehensive understanding of factory conditions.
They conduct hundreds of visits each year. Factories are assessed on a minimum 18-month cycle. However, factories with outstanding concerns or allegations of misconduct are visited more frequently, also unannounced.
We address issues by implementing Corrective Action Plans, developed in collaboration with factory management. You can read more about our work in our Due Diligence Report.
Making informed decisions
The data from each factory assessment is fed into our internal information systems. This data serves as the basis for our Supplier Ratings, which are shared with our colleagues at brand level to help them make informed purchasing decisions, and place orders with the best performing suppliers within those criteria.
However, we also use these assessments to identify suppliers with whom we can engage to improve any highlighted issues. We do that through knowledge sharing and training.
Where a factory’s assessment reports show room for improvement, a Corrective Action Plan (CAP) is created, and our local colleagues visit the factories and provide them with guidance and training to make sure the necessary improvements are made.
In cases where we find that factories are not meeting our minimum requirements, we have a clearly defined escalation protocol. In the rare case that a factory or supplier is not sufficiently committed to remediating critical issues, we will – as a last resort – offboard the factory and possibly the supplier.
We believe that effective grievance mechanisms are fundamental for respecting workers’ rights and enhancing social dialogue, as they create the conditions for early resolution and shared accountability between workers, factory management, and brands.
Therefore, we require all factories to establish and maintain factory-level grievance mechanisms that are accessible, confidential and ensure workers can raise concerns without fear of retaliation or negative consequences, in line with the UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights.
Find more information about grievance mechanisms in our Due Diligence Report
Through BESTSELLER's parent company, HEARTLAND, we have a whistle-blower system that is available to all colleagues and cooperation partners. All reports are received by a team consisting of a few people from HEARTLAND A/S and United Law A/S. The whistle-blower system is not managed by the Global Supply Chain department.