Maximum guarantee of our commitment to customers
Inditex’s commitment to guarantee our customers environmentally responsible and sustainable products includes preventive control actions at all stages of production: design, selection of raw materials and dyes, manufacturing and printing systems, monitoring during manufacturing and continuous innovation in all processes.
Picking
The Picking programme is a key tool at the production stage in order to guarantee the quality of all products. Moreover, in recent years it has developed to become the most comprehensive and efficient verification tool for Inditex’s specific business model.
Picking is organized into various stages, which include the prior assessment of the potential risks of each item. This entails taking representative samples of the products for analysis and testing in accredited analytical laboratories, to establish whether the items meet Inditex’s Clear to Wear (CtW) and Safe to Wear (StW) health and safety standards. The programme also includes a detailed study of the results so that, if possible, specific modifications can be made in order to comply with CtW and StW standards.
Additionally, to make the programme more efficient and effective, Inditex has collaborated with chemical and mathematical researchers at the University of Santiago de Compostela to develop statistical analysis tools that enable the detection of manufacturing technologies that pose a risk of breach (Manufacturing Epidemiology), the breakdown of manufacturing risk with regard to the components of the garments, and optimization of the use of resources for the Picking programme. These focus on items or components that pose a potential risk.
In this respect, in recent years we have managed to increase the use of cutting-edge technologies when assessing the potential risk of each item and increase the agility with which the analysis is carried out. This means that we have been able to check compliance with the standards in a higher number of products using fewer analysis studies, without compromising our commitment to and maximum responsibility for the health and safety of our products.
Innovation
The development of innovation projects in close collaboration with academic institutions such as the University of Santiago de Compostela and the Polytechnic University of Catalonia, and with public and private scientific and technological partners, has been essential to the development of many of the key tools used by Inditex to ensure that our products are healthy and safe for our customers.
With regard to accuracy in labelling the composition of garments, we are cooperating with renowned international institutes and technology centres to develop new technologies, mainly aimed at distinguishing between certain animal and plant fibres that are difficult to differentiate using conventional testing methods; for example, cashmere and wool or linen and ramie.
A key step in ongoing progress towards the use of better technologies for the manufacture of our items is to replace the less desirable chemical substances used with safer alternatives.
To achieve this, in collaboration with biologists at the University of Santiago de Compostela, we are developing a testing method to quantitatively establish the toxicity indexes of the chemical substances used in the textile and footwear industries and to identify candidate substances to replace them. The initial results from this project are being used to guide the search for safe substitutes for PFCs in water-repellent applications for outerwear garments.