Our business impacts the lives of thousands of people around the world, meaning we have to be proactive in our approach to advancing positive working conditions and protecting human rights.

All of the factories and suppliers we work with must go through a rigorous screening process.

• All partners must conduct annual audits of their factories and processes, making sure improvements are made and standards are up to scratch.
• Ted’s Ethical Trade and Production teams regularly visit suppliers all over the world.
• Some of our partners have been onboard with us forover twenty years.

Ted’s Ethical Code of Conduct is the cornerstone of this commitment. It covers our principles for safe, fair and decent work and all locations must adhere to it.

Read Ted’s code here

All of our partners and factories agree to our standards on working conditions, business ethics, traceability, environmental stewardship and use of chemicals.

Our Ethical Code of Conduct is based on international conventions such as the Ethical Trading Initiative Base Code, the UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the ILO Core Conventions and more.

The Code of Conduct, ethical policies, annual audits, rigorous screening process, and supplier relationships mean ethical challenges can be addressed and steps towards positive change can be made. This process minimises the risk of falling short of our own exacting expectations and standards. We work closely with our suppliers to continuously improve conditions, making sure that any issues are addressed by getting to the root cause.

We have produced toolkits for engaging and informing our internal teams and help make business decisions too. These toolkits highlight worker related challenges and broader social issues that could impact our supply chain.

The fashion industry’s supply chains are complex and don’t come without their problems. Some key issues we face are excessive working hours in some of our China factories, and the use of multiple sub contractors in our Turkey factories, which are two of our largest sourcing countries. We are working closely with our suppliers with high risk issues to provide support and guidance and in addition have teamed up with The Reassurance Network (TRN), to implement a training and monitoring programme in some of our key factories in both Turkey and China.

Like for many of our peers, this is no mean feat and takes time but gives us a better chance of ensuring that our products are created in facilities committed to providing fair and safe environments for their workers. In order to ensure we have the right support to protect workers in our supply chain, we joined the Ethical Trading Initiative (ETI). We are very excited to be a party of this industry leading multi-stakeholder community. We recognise the importance of collaboration to make meaningful systemic changes to improve labour rights across the garment supply chain.

In addition, we became members of SEDEX, to centralise the way we collate information from our audits, which provides us with greater insights in to systemic issues. Through this we can make impactful changes to support our suppliers.

We work with different third party partners, including Licensees, Joint venture, and occasionally promotors. These partners use their own supply chain, however, we have created a third party policy which ensures they are still meetings Ted’s minimum standards.

Read about our third party policy

Here at Ted, we’re committed to achieving a greater supply chain transparency. We’ve put together a complete list of all first-tier factories, where our finished goods are made and shipped from. This includes factory names, addresses, as well as some additional information about the facilities. We have also included a map of sourcing countries used by our third-party licensee partners.

Since October 2020, we have been publishing our first-tier factory map on the Open Apparel Registry. We see this as an important first step, with the second step being to continue mapping our second-tier facilities and beyond. We have now mapped our subcontracting units and will continue to map all the facilities and people throughout our supply chain.

See the List

We’ve set out to map our complex supply chain and have committed to making sure our processes, practices and ways of working are as transparent as they can be. This is an important step towards ensuring unethical practices, such as modern slavery, has less chance of rearing its head in the supply chain.

Fun Facts About our Supply Chain

• We map our supply chain of over 70,000 people so we can take care of them. The most important part of our supply chain is the people who work within it.
• We have over 140 first-tier factories in 17 different sourcing countries.
• 100% of our first-tier factories have agreed to the code and have an ethical audit.
• Over 70,000 workers are employed in thefirst-tierof our supply chain.
• 72% of these workers are women.

We believe certain things must be put in place in order to work towards positive change: transparency and honesty are two of them. With that in mind, we’ve set out to map our complex supply chain and have committed to making sure our processes, practices and ways of working are as transparent as they can be. This is an important step towards ensuring an unethical practice like modern slavery has less chance of rearing its head in the supply chain.

Read the statement

While much is being done to address poor practice across the global industry, we’re also making positive changes in the areas surrounding our London head office. We work with local partners and schools on masterclasses, talks and presentations. We also nurture local talent through mentoring, networking and workshops, inspiring people to consider careers in the creative and business worlds, while providing work experience. We’ve also put our terminal stock to good use, and repurposed equipment to give back to the community.

Working with Camden STEAM, we hosted a 5-day Business Challenge for students, tasking them to choose an inspirational theme and design a pair of trainers. They then pitched to a panel of Ted’s trusty experts, with the winning team now working with our footwear designers to have their shoes made

Another of our highlights was the ‘Shirtfather’ design workshop with New River College, a consortium of three Pupil Referral Units. Students were asked to create products and garments using Ted fabrics. The pupils then presented their creations to our Production Director, with the best designs getting hand-picked to go into production.

Whether halfway across the globe or a little closer to home, Ted pledges to take care of the people at the very core of the community.

Here at Ted, we’re passionate about having a company as diverse as our customer base. Our team members represent more than 68 nationalities worldwide, with 44 in our London HQ alone. When it comes to gender pay, we’ll be completely upfront: there’s still an imbalance. Our aim is to achieve a more equal representation across all levels of our organisation, reducing the gap that currently exists.

Remember, gender pay doesn’t mean men and women are paid differently for doing the same job (this is ‘equal pay’ and it’s been illegal for years!). However, we do still have an overall gap in average male and female earnings that we’re taking steps to reduce.

We’ve made a number of significant female senior appointments in the past year, but while women are well represented at the very top and in our overall workforce, there’s more work to be done to develop and grow our own female senior leaders from within.

We’re now sharing our Gender Pay Report with the snapshot date of 5th April 2020 and 5th April 2021 so you can see where we’re at and what action we’re taking. On 24th March 2020, the Equalities Commission said that this reporting was not compulsory and only around 50% of organisations have shared theirs, but we think it’s important to be open and honest.

Read the report