Community Care

We have close relationships with our suppliers, many of whom are smaller businesses who we’ve worked with for many years.

Every supplier that works with Paul Smith is required to sign and return our Supplier Code of Conduct, which details our expectations regarding modern slavery, bribery, sourcing, labour, animal welfare and the environment.

In addition, all tier one suppliers (suppliers with which we have a direct relationship as buyer) are required to complete and return our Social Compliance Self-Assessment Questionnaire (SAQ), which involves assessment of their working conditions including working hours, wages and benefits, health and safety, equality, freedom of association and that employment is freely chosen with no child labour used.

We are working with external assurance experts, Intertek, to digitalise the Social Compliance SAQ, which is due to go live later this year. Working with Intertek assures us that our SAQ will be thorough, accurate and reliable. It is based on the underlying principles of the International Labour Organization. The platform will inform us of any risks within our supply chain by scoring our suppliers’ assessment answers, ranking them from high to low risk. Towards the end of this year and into next, we will develop a supplier risk improvement programme to ensure that any potential risks and minimised and ultimately removed.

Traceability is important to us. We have complete traceability of our tier one supply chain, and the majority of tier two, meaning those products over which we don’t have full production control. During the financial year ended 30 June 2022 we sourced our fabrics and components from 161 fabric and 88 trim suppliers and engaged 188 factories to manufacture our products. 49.8% of our manufacturing took place in Europe with the remainder in Asia (42.9%) and Africa (7.3%).

At the same time, we’re looking for new or additional factories and suppliers who are developing more sustainable processes and innovative new practices. This approach extends to new collaborations, license agreements and bought-in product suppliers where sustainability plays a key part in partnership discussions.

To help us improve our social impact across our supply chain, we completed the Sustainability Apparel Coalition’s Higg Index Brand Retail Module for the first time in 2021. The index measures environmental and social impacts across our supply chain and own operations. The assessment provided us with key opportunities to improve our impact which we are working on to improve our environmental and social scores on the Index year on year.

Throughout the Covid-19 pandemic, we continued to support the workers within our supply chain by maintaining all existing work and in-progress orders.

Sustainability Ambassador Group

In February 2022 we launched our own global internal Sustainability Ambassador Group. This has allowed 45 employees from 21 different departments to meet every quarter to share ideas, concerns and accelerate our progress towards a more environmentally friendly future in fashion.

The group allows us to raise sustainability awareness across the company through the engagement of employees as well as educating on topics such as circular design, recycling, and modern slavery.