Sustainability & the Environment

As part of our commitment to “Product”, we place great importance on ethical and sustainable sourcing within the Group. We believe our products should be produced in factories that are committed to providing a fair and safe environment for their workers. Our trusted partners within the supply chain are one of our most valuable assets.

• All Ted Baker suppliers are governed by our Company Code of Conduct, which is based on the Social Accountability International Code, an internationally recognised benchmark for ethical excellence, and can be found at http://externalresources.tedbaker.com/legaldocs/codes_of_conduct.pdf.
• Through our partnership with MADE-BY, a non-profit multi-stakeholder initiative set up to improve sustainability within the fashion industry, we have been able to set long-term internal targets for the amount of sustainable fibres we use in our collections. Our Social Scorecard for 2011 was released during the period and can be found at http://www.made-by.org/partner-brand/34/ted-baker/scorecard. This shows the improvement we have made in sourcing from more sustainable factories and we worked to further improve this in our 2012 scorecard. Our third Scorecard will be released during the period.
• During the period we continued two long-term social improvement programmes with key suppliers as part of our partnership with MADE-BY and started a third. These projects involve working closely with these suppliers to improve their social and working practices.
• We participate in the Metrics group, which is responsible for identifying the key hotspots within the industry to measure, as well as working on a tool to measure our baseline carbon, water and waste footprints and what improvement actions are possible to take in this area.
• We are also part of the Sustainable Clothing Action Plan, a Department for Environment, Food, and Rural Affairs sponsored action plan, organised to improve the sustainability of clothing across its lifecycle by bringing together industry, government and third parties to develop sector-wide targets, along with the tools and guidance necessary to reach them.
• Animal welfare is an important issue to many consumers and we have always sourced from the highest quality suppliers. Our Group Animal Welfare Policy was made public this year and can be found at www.tedbaker.com/about_us/our_policies/content.aspx#ethical_statement. We have decided not to retail fragrance or skinwear in our Chinese stores to ensure we are able to hold true to our principles of not testing on animals.

In order to “Practise” our goals and achieve our targets we place great importance on the Teducation of our employees to support the community in a number of ways. Throughout the year we have supported various charities and taken part in valuable and exciting projects.

• Our employees are our greatest asset and we have Ted’s Conscience Team members in every department and store worldwide encouraging colleagues to be more environmentally aware. During 2012/13 we trialled participation in Ted’s Conscience with a number of our concessions and aim to roll this out during 2013/14.
• Our Green Guardian gives twice yearly store team training sessions to ensure our sustainability issues are communicated across the business.
• We released our first Ted’s Conscience Newsletter which has been sent to all areas of the business to advise team members on our policies, plans, targets and partners.
• Movember: We supported the Movember Initiative, asking as many of our teams as possible to grow a moustache to raise awareness and funds for prostate and testicular cancer.
• Oxfam: We continued to encourage our teams to use our inhouse “Oxfam Collects” Collection Point. This enables team members to donate any unwanted items to Oxfam during the course of their usual working week.
• We also donated various garments to other charities and groups during 2012 such as Dress for Success, an agency that assists women getting back into work, Centrepoint, which supports Homeless young people, and Kids Co, a London based charity that supports under privileged children.
• We keep two buckfast bee colonies on the roof of our London head office from which we had a hugely successful honey harvest during 2012.