Fashion Footprint Festivals
To increase awareness and enthusiasm for Fashion Footprint and raise funds for the Fashion Footprint charity (currently Tender Heart, India), every year we run Fashion Footprint days at our head offices. In 2011, the days took place in July and the theme was Summer festivals.
This included internal communications on our Fashion Footprint progress to date, fundraising through sample sales, including a sale of unique sample and vintage items donated by Miss Selfridge, as well as festival-style food sales.
You can read more about monies raised for Tender Heart under Our Communities.
Training and development
Employees are measured on core competencies as part of our annual review process. All employees have Fashion Footprint competencies and anyone who has a role that involves sourcing product, namely our Buying, Merchandising, Design and Technical teams, also works to competencies that include ethical trading.
All Arcadia Group employees in buying, merchandising, design and technical services have attended an Introduction to Ethical Trading workshop, which includes more than 1,000 people.
Purchasing Practices is a project we have developed to raise awareness within our buying teams about how our design processes and buying practices impact on our suppliers, their factories and workers (see Our Products for more). By the end of August 2011, over 110 people had attended Purchasing Practices training and we aim to have this rolled out to all relevant employees by the end of 2012.
Fashion Footprint continues to be rolled out throughout BHS. We are currently incorporating ethical trading matters into the competencies of relevant employees. BHS employees participate in our Introduction to Ethical Trading workshops. By the end of August 2011, over 100 BHS people had attended this workshop.
In January 2011, we asked all BHS employees to take part in an extensive survey about ethical and environmental issues and 112 head office members of staff responded. The key concerns and priorities they raised were global warming, labour in our suppliers’ factories, and how we could improve recycling facilities in the workplace. Over 90% of the respondents considered it important that BHS should be viewed as being socially responsible.
