Product health and safety

Our customer pledge is underpinned by the promise that our products are healthy, safe and sustainable. To honour that commitment we have stringent mandatory standards that apply across the board and cover the manufacturing practices followed by all the suppliers in our supply chain.

• Our Clear to Wear (CtW) standard regulates the substances used in making our garments that, under prevailing legislation, could be potentially harmful. In 2021 we updated that standard, having evaluated more than 1,800 substances, paying special attention to their consequences for human health and for the environment.
• In 2021 we also created the Physical Testing Requirements standard which includes the physical parameters that used to be included in the Clear to Wear standard.
• Our Safe to Wear (StW) standard governs the design of items for children and limits specific parameters such as fabric flammability in children’s and adult wear. We published the first edition of our dedicated Safe to Wear for Children’s Footwear standard, specifically designed and of general and mandatory application to all children footwear.
• We also have dedicated standards for other specific product classes: I+Cosmetics regulates the substances whose use in cosmetics is legally curtailed. I+FCM addresses the health and safety of all products that are in contact with food. I+Home Fragrances & Candles, whose second edition was published in 2021, applies to all home fragrance products, while I+Child Care Furniture is similarly applicable in child care articles.

We have a series of specific programmes for ensuring compliance with our universe of standards. Picking is a control and analysis programme, which, with the help of scientific and technology advisors, works to efficiently identify product non-conformance. In 2021, we conducted 49,999 picking inspections, which entailed 792,582 tests and analyses.

To complement those inspections, we devised the Minilabs initiative, a portable laboratory that can analyse, at any time, as many as six screenings for substances and parameters regulated in our Clear to Wear standard. In 2021, the Minilab conducted 3,753 Picking inspections, which entailed 33,325 screening tests and analyses.

In addition, under our Root Cause Analysis (RCA) programme, experts conduct technical audits to identify the source of any non-conformity at wet processing facilities (dying, washing, tanning and printing) and devise specific corrective actions plans to prevent their recurrence in the future. In 2021, we carried 17 RCA audits.

It is very important to oversee the labs comprising our analytical network to ensure they work in a uniform manner and maximise the accuracy of their findings. The credibility of those labs is underpinned by a programme for certifying outside labs called APPLABs. In all we carried out 38 in situ audits of external labs and 35 comparative analyses, all of which involved the analysis of 6,653 samples.