Patagonia
Social Responsibility means different things to different people. To Patagonia it means acting in line with their mission statement, values, and code of conduct in order that they are seeking to improve the quality of life of employees, their families, communities, and society overall.
Social Responsibility to Patagonia is a crucial focus on their relationships with the people who work in the factories that produce their clothing. Their aim is to ensure the products are made under safe, fair, legal and humane working conditions. Employees are remunerated well, receive good benefits, share similar values, and turnover is very low.
They try and work with factories that share their values around integrity and environmentalism.
In the 1990s, contract management and quality assurance staff starting reviewing the factories that they dealt with to ensure good working conditions and high product quality. If a visit was not permitted, the contract was terminated at the earliest given opportunity. A scorecard was introduced to manage performance with every factory they work with. Low performing factories quickly become an area of focus for quality assurance and contract management. Third party factory audits also became common practice.
On expansion, a Social Responsibility manager was hired to monitor social compliance across the supply chain to continuously improve working conditions in every factory. This programme of work included training for staff on Social Responsibility related issues, and compliance with the code of conduct. Patagonia has also invested significantly in the footprint chronicles for which they trace the environmental impact of products from design to distribution. Patagonia has most recently reduced the number of factories they work with in order to enable a closer working relationship and a deeper understanding of their supply chains. For each of their factories they look at quality assurance, business requirements, social responsibility and environmental footprint. They are currently in the process of producing a communications pack on social responsibility for each of the factories they work with.
As demonstrated above, Patagonia takes Social Responsibility extremely seriously. Whilst this is vital, it is equally important to effectively communicate the commitment, in order to ensure it is embedded in the culture throughout the organisation. An example of Patagonia's outstanding communication can be seen on its website
