Responsible Purchasing Practices
We work with our supply chain partners to uphold business practices that support critical social and environmental standards.
Why
A brand’s purchasing practices can have serious implications on a supplier’s workforce and workplace conditions. Purchasing practices is how we describe working with a factory during the conception, development and creation of a product. It can include everything from designing and developing products to placing orders to forecasting and negotiating costs. When done poorly or not enforced, our suppliers’ factories can be put in compromising situations—forcing them to underpay workers, impose excessive hours and unsafe working conditions, conduct layoffs or employ unauthorized subcontractors—just to meet buyer demands. For example, if we told a supplier we wanted to make 200,000 jackets but later changed our minds to only 100,000, they’d be left with excess fabric, less revenue than anticipated and insufficient work for employees they’d hired. These types of decisions affect all parties involved and emphasize the importance of responsible practices.
Responsible Purchasing Practices are a company's commitment to establishing and implementing policies that consider the needs of both the brand and supplier to create a fair and mutually beneficial partnership. Examples of Responsible Purchasing Practices include clearly defining and adhering to agreed-upon order quantities, payment and terms; providing the supplier with enough lead time and technical details to create the product; and the brand and supplier taking on the shared duty of social and environmental responsibility.
Ethical purchasing is at the heart of social responsibility and any worker well-being or environmental impact programs brands may have. Our purchasing practices can help or hinder our suppliers’ ability to uphold business practices that support critical social and environmental standards. It’s an underdiscussed topic among brands, especially in the apparel industry. That’s why we believe these conversations must go beyond the factory and be more widely shared, so Responsible Purchasing Practices become the norm rather than the exception.
Where We Are
Patagonia has had a long history of embracing Responsible Purchasing Practices (RPP), which have been a fundamental part of our company’s values for decades. When the Fair Labor Association® (FLA)—a global multi-stakeholder organization dedicated to advancing workers’ rights—incorporated RPP into its required standards in 2011, it helped us document existing activities and establish new ones, creating a more cohesive and integrated approach to RPP policies and practices. As a founding and accredited member of the FLA, Patagonia’s RPP program is regularly audited and evaluated by an independent third party. The FLA holds us accountable to its standards and monitors our progress each year.
The work of establishing and maintaining RPP goes beyond a single department. It's a company-wide initiative that requires commitment from the CEO, executives and teams across the organization including: forecasting, planning, design, product development, sourcing, production, materials, finance, and social and environmental impact, among others.
At Patagonia, this work has been central in conversations with our leadership team and across various departments. In the early years, our focus was educating our leadership about the concepts and importance of RPP—starting with our CEO. Education has been the cornerstone of all our social impact programs, and for RPP, it was key in fostering understanding and building strong support, and continues to play an important role today.
In 2015, we formed an RPP Taskforce to meet regularly, review and assess our performance in key areas of RPP like forecast accuracy, identify areas for improvement, and proactively manage business decisions that could impact suppliers and their workforce. Today, this taskforce includes our chief supply chain officer, vice presidents of global planning, product innovation and sourcing, as well as key leaders in forecasting, planning, product development, and social impact and transparency.
Our RPP efforts have gone hand in hand with our pre-sourcing and supplier management process known as our “4-fold” approach to supply chain decisions. Our weekly 4-fold meeting brings together teams from sourcing, quality, and social and environmental impact to address issues with current suppliers and carefully vet new ones. As a cross-functional group, we can better understand the impacts of our decisions on the business and stay aligned on RPP priorities.
In 2021, we formed a strategic partnership with the Better Buying Institute (BBI), a nonprofit established to promote responsible purchasing practices and give suppliers a way to provide feedback on a brand’s business practices. As a BBI brand partner, we use anonymous feedback from both tiers of our supply chain (finished goods and fabric suppliers) to identify gaps, share them with our teams and work together to address RPP target areas. Our partnership with BBI has helped us effectively use supplier feedback by standardizing the process, anonymizing responses and introducing measurable key performance indicators. These improvements have given us actionable insights into areas of success and opportunities for improvement.
Our commitment to RPP extends outside our brand, from playing an active role in the industry to helping motivate more brands to adopt responsible purchasing practices. For instance, we partnered with BBI and a couple of like-minded brands to develop an introductory eLearning course on RPP. This training course is used internally at Patagonia and the collaborating brands, and is also available to the broader industry through the BBI website with the goal of raising awareness and baseline understanding of RPP.
Additionally, we support the Common Framework for Responsible Purchasing Practices (CFRPP) and have contributed to several educational pieces, including a brand case study on RPP, interviews and webinars. Launched in 2022, CFRPP is an industry-wide initiative backed by the FLA, Ethical Trading Initiative, Fair Wear Foundation and other multi-stakeholder organizations, aimed at guiding companies in learning about and implementing responsible purchasing practices within their businesses. We also support Better Work’s Responsible Business Conduct framework, which encourages companies to adopt policies and practices that embed responsible business practices throughout their supply chains.
What’s Next
Using business to inspire and implement solutions has always been part of Patagonia’s DNA and vision. We are working on taking our RPP efforts even further by expanding our public reporting on our purchasing practices and making some of our internal tools available for other companies as a resource. We hope to collaborate and share insights with brands and organizations to drive action toward more responsible business practices throughout the industry.
