Tommy Hilfiger’s Greenwash

Join the #makeapromise twitter campaign and ask Tommy Hilfiger to end poverty of his garment workers. Read below why! Tweet #makeapromise !function(d,s,id){var js,fjs=d.getElementsByTagName(s)[0];if(!d.getElementById(id)){js=d.createElement(s);js.id=id;js.src="//platform.twitter.com/widgets.js";fjs.parentNode.insertBefore(js,fjs);}}(document,"script","twitter-wjs"); #makeapromise Have you heard about Tommy Hilfiger’s Make a Promise Campaign? The company is making a big splash about the money it’s giving a rural region of Uganda – all “in the hope of making long-term changes that will benefit generations”. Rank a Brand has several problems with this campaign – and they all add up to one conclusion. Tommy Hilfiger is greenwashing its sparse and patchy CSR record. And it is doing so very cheaply indeed, especially given its scale. Applause for the work on the ground First things first, this campaign supports Millennium Villages. These are the good guys who actually do all the hard work: helping farmers to commercialize, building new school facilities, securing fresh water and providing medical services. We salute what they do. Take a look at their website and see how you can support them. Crunch the numbers: it’s a tip In 2009, the Tommy Hilfiger Corporate Foundation (their philanthropic arm) announced a €1,5 million (€1,500,000) commitment to Millenium Villages. This will be handed out over five years in the Ruhiira region of Uganda. In 2010, Tommy Hilfiger posted total global retail sales of €3,5 billion (€3,500,000,000). Given these revenues, the pledge amounts to the equivalent of the average Joe who earns €33,000 giving €2.87 each year to a charity. Not close to covering Ruhiira’s needs Millenium Villages needs €45 per person each year in donations for each of their projects. With approximately 50,000 villagers in Ruhiira, Millenium Vilages needs €2.3 million annually. By pledging €1,5 million over 5 years, Tommy Hilfiger is contributing around 13% of the project’s annual donor requirements. Tommy Hilfiger benefits Tommy Hilfiger is pushing this campaign hard: with a billboard campaign, in-store marketing materials, online advertising, a twitter competition, a micro-site, and celebrity sponsorship (thank you, Katie Holmes). And of course the cocktail parties. This kind of PR campaign does not come cheap – the bill for these activities almost certainly amounts to many millions of euros. The press and blog coverage of this campaign is pretty much all full of praise. In other words, the PR campaign is a success – and that’s hugely valuable to a consumer brand – and all for a pretty small outlay. Tommy Hilfiger’s exploitation of the poor Tommy Hilfiger has so far been a laggard when it comes to improving labour conditions in its own supply chains. So far it has been not transparent and uncooperative, while its clothing is produced by some of the poorest and most easily exploited people in the world. Tommy’s lack of transparency is reflected in the extremely low score in our rating. Bangladesh A year ago, 29 people died in fire at a Bangladeshi factory where Tommy Hilfiger clothing was produced – they were trapped inside because several of the fire exits had been locked. When ABC news (shocking footage!) confronted Tommy Hilfiger himself about what had been done to improve conditions at these factories, he said his company would never make clothes at those facilities again. Which was a lie. As Tommy was forced to admit in an interview with, yes, ABC news. Indonesia, India Heavy labour problems were also found in one of Tommy’s Indonesian factories, where workers were fired after joining a labour union. It took the labour movement more than two years of campaigning before Tommy helped solving the problem. Reports on violations against young women workers in India were never followed up by Tommy. Time to change We don’t want Tommy Hilfiger to stop supporting Ruhiira. And we’re not demanding that it starts giving Ruhiira more money. We just want to point out that if Tommy Hilfiger really wants to “make long-term changes that will benefit generations”, it should look closer to home – and start empowering and protecting the people who work in its factories. Join the #makeapromise twitter campaign and ask Tommy Hilfiger to end poverty of his garment workers. Tweet #makeapromise !function(d,s,id){var js,fjs=d.getElementsByTagName(s)[0];if(!d.getElementById(id)){js=d.createElement(s);js.id=id;js.src="//platform.twitter.com/widgets.js";fjs.parentNode.insertBefore(js,fjs);}}(document,"script","twitter-wjs");

H&M’s ‘Conscious Actions’ in 2011

The CSR season has started. Loads of CSR reports are made public every year in spring – mainly by fashion brands. H&M is among the first to bring out its 2011 report ‘Conscious Actions’. With this report, the brand shows the world that it wants to be the world’s eco fast fashion leader. A report stuffed with impressive numbers gives us the impression that H&M really does its best to achieve this goal. In the past year, the brand used recycled polyester to a stunning equivalent of 9.2 million plastic bottles. It also produced almost 2.5 million pairs of shoes using lower-impact water-based solvents. Furthermore, in 2010 H&M outstripped Walmart as the biggest buyer of organic cotton, and they have kept this number one position throughout 2011. Yet, the question remains whether fast fashion can actually really be sustainable. When a brand sells about ten collections a year – like H&M does – this also leads to a fashion item being tossed into the litter bin about ten times as quickly. Being the world’s second largest clothing retailer, they sell approximately 550 million fashion items a year. While the production of organic cotton does require far less water than conventional cotton, it still takes a whole lot of water to grow the organic cotton required for these amounts of clothes. Therefore, we took another close look at H&M to find out to what extent the new report actually affects the sustainability ranking of the brand. H&M in fact gains 2 extra points, for the following reasons: Material use: the percentage of organic cotton has increased up to 7.6% of the total cotton collection. Labour conditions: H&M is highly transparent about its audits in supplier factories. On average, in 2011, at least one audit has been carried out in every factory. According to H&M, in 77% of these audits the factory proved to have met their Code of Conduct entirely. That is a high percentage. Still, it has to be noted that the audits seem to be carried out by the brand itself, and not by the independent Fair Labor Association – even though H&M is a member. Also worth mentioning, is the ‘Energy Efficiency Improvement Programme’ that H&M started in 45 of its supplier factories. This demonstrates that the brand lived up to the promises it made in its 2010 CSR report. H&M now has 10 out of 16 points. Word of advice on how to improve on these last points: we would like to see clear carbon footprint reporting. In its 2011 report, H&M provides a carbon footprint relative to its sales. This does not say anything about a possible decline of the total emissions. In fact, it makes us quietly suspect that the emissions in effect haven’t decreased at all…