1. What is Ethical Trading?
A commitment to ethical trading means an assurance that practical efforts are made to protect and promote certain standards of labour practices throughout a supply chain. These standards are not only those defined by national laws, but also as defined by recognised organisations such as the Ethical Trading Initiative (ETI).
Ethical trading requires an organisation to take responsibility for the conditions in which products it sells are made, and to adopt an approach of continual improvement when working with suppliers.
Best Badges recognise our ethical obligations both to the workers involved in producing products that we sell, and to our customers who entrust commissions of work to us.
2. Working with Overseas Suppliers
Best Badges are a UK manufacturer of button badges, acrylic keyrings, and other printed promotional items. The name badges we sell are also UK made. Other products that we supply (primarily metal and enamel items and embroidered and woven patches) are produced overseas (in China).
Our overseas relationships are formed with a limited number of suppliers with whom we build long term partnerships. This long-term approach allows us to develop mutual trust, to build confidence in the labour practices employed, and to encourage improvement in practice over time. We do not engage in ‘wide-net’ sourcing, recognising the ethical risks inherent in working with poorly monitored or researched production partners.
Key aspects of our overseas approach include:
- Personal visits by our company director to factory facilities in China.
- Reciprocal visits by supplier executives to our production facilities in the UK.
- A requirement for our suppliers to be open to audit, and to share historical audit reports.
- Recognition of the importance of supplier participation in recognised certification schemes such as Sedex and BSCI.
- Encouragement of open communication of production faults and problems through a partnered approach to solving those problems.
- Never imposing financial penalties for delays, in such a way that bad practice could be inadvertently encouraged.
- Not making pressured price demands or requesting ad-hoc price reductions, and instead adhering to fixed price lists that enable suppliers to know a fair price will be paid for all work completed.
- Not imposing unrealistic time pressures that could encourage bad practices within production processes.
3. Our Commitment
Best Badges are committed to promoting improvement in working conditions for all those involved in the production of products we sell. We support a base code of labour practice defined by the Ethical Trading Initiative (although we are not members of the ETI) and we expect our suppliers to work towards the standards of labour practice defined in the code.
Please refer to the Ethical Trading Initiative for further information on the Base Code.