"Shine a light on leather", 3 November 2022

This paper analyses the current state of supply chain transparency in the leather-based apparel, footwear, and accessories industry. For this paper report SOMO has investigated the level of supply chain transparency of 100 international buyers: brands, retailers, online retailers (“e-tailers”), and fashion conglomerates that sell leather jackets, trousers, shoes, belts, gloves, bags, and so on.

Together with this paper, we are publishing a discussion paper where we make the case for enhanced supply chain transparency in the leather-based garment, footwear, and accessories sector...

SOMO used information from various sources to undertake this analysis. These included Fashion Revolution’s 2021 Transparency Index...Veraart Research Group’s Retail-Index, and Refinitiv Eikon.

We also looked at the supply chain transparency requirements that responsible business initiatives, multistakeholder initiatives (MSIs), and sustainability certification schemes have in place for their member companies. We checked the scope of such requirements and whether they are merely “soft” suggestions or genuinely “hard” standards.

We undertook this review of brands and retailers’ supply chain disclosures in June 2022, so the outcomes we report are a reflection of these companies’ practices at that time. All websites cited were accessed in June 2022.

Outcomes

The most important outcomes of this analysis are:

• Less than one-third (29 out of 100) of the buyers we looked at publish a supplier list.
• Of this group of 29 companies, 12 of their supplier lists contain information only about first-tier suppliers or end-product manufacturers.
• Beyond the first-tier suppliers, public information is very limited. We conclude that the level of public supply chain transparency provided by the majority of the 100 selected companies is very low.
• The responsible business initiatives, MSIs, and certification schemes we looked at offer weak guidance to their members when it comes to supply chain transparency. Most initiatives leave it to their members to decide whether to publish supplier information. Only the US-based Fair Labor Association (FLA) goe further, stating that its corporate members must make public their first-tier supplier list by March 2022.

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