TRACEABILITY

We know exactly where all the articles we sell are made, ensuring that our supply chain meets our rigorous sustainability requirements.

Traceability lies at the heart of our ability to guarantee that all the suppliers and manufacturers involved in the making of our products achieve our social, environmental, and health&safety standards. For us, traceability does not end with our first tier suppliers –outsourced suppliers with whom we have direct business dealings–, but rather stretches all the way to the last link in our production chain.

Our suppliers are obliged to declare all the facilities and processes they use to make each garment: from the facilities in which they cut, make/sew and finish/trim to their laundering, printing, dry-cleaning and spinning facilities and beyond – all of which are bound by our standards and monitoring schemes.

TRANSPARENCY IS FUNDAMENTAL IN OUR RELATIONSHIPS WITH SUPPLIERS

We are in direct communication with our suppliers thanks to the ad-hoc systems we have developed in-house. These systems allow us to control all purchase orders and analyse our production performance every step of the way. To ensure our suppliers are making our products where they claim to be and under the right conditions, we carry out traceability audits.

Traceability II

These traceability audits assess the information provided by our suppliers and compare it with their production capacity, processes and the time it takes them to fulfil orders. In short, we verify that all of the production units they use have been formerly notified and approved.

The involvement of our buyer teams, which only work with Code of Conduct compliant suppliers, is key to this work stream. They are provided with ongoing sustainability training to keep them abreast of important issues.

If, during one of our traceability audits, we find that a given supplier has failed to declare a production unit, our sustainability and buyer teams work together to ensure the supplier addresses this situation and commits to complying with our traceability requirements. Should the supplier fail to remedy the situation or to apply the improvements demanded by Inditex, we rescind our business relationship with that supplier, a circumstance that is entered into our internal system. From that juncture on, no-body at Inditex can place an order with that supplier.

SUPPLIERS AND FACTORIES IN OUR CLUSTERS
Cluster Suppliers Factories
Spain 216 384
Portugal 171 1,336
Morocco 106 253
Turkey 183 1,423
India 134 329
Bangladesh 81 226
Vietnam 5 137
Cambodia 1 101
China 340 1,361
Argentina 64 119
Brazil 37 178
Pakistan 42 39
 
Our traceability efforts in facts and figures:
  • 2,776 traceability audits performed in the last year
  • 89% of compliance
  • 17 suppliers black-listed for breach of traceability requirements