Why transparency makes fashion better & how technology can help
You may have heard that fast fashion is bad for the planet, but what’s not talked about as much is how it’s also bad for the people who make our clothes. The fashion industry is one of the largest employers in the world, employing an estimated 430 million workers around the globe. Many of whom are women working in unsafe conditions for low wages.
While consumers are now aware of fashion’s impact on the environment, most still don’t realize that their buying decisions can also support or hurt human rights and workers’ wellbeing.
Why is transparency important in fashion?
First of all, transparency helps you know where your clothes are made and by whom. If a company is open about where their products come from and who makes them, then it’s easier for people to hold them accountable! The more information we have about a company’s supply chain, the more likely we are to be able to tell if something isn’t quite right with how they operate.
When it comes to transparency and traceability, the fashion industry is not exactly known for its ethical practices. This means that your clothing may have been made by someone who was unfairly paid or in conditions that were unsafe or even dangerous, and you’ll never find out about it!
The lack of transparency in the fashion industry makes things especially difficult for workers. As an example, imagine that you work at a factory and make a shirt every day. The company you work for sells this shirt for $50, but they only pay you $2 per shirt because they want to make the maximum profit. If all this information were transparent, then consumers would be able to know what kind of working conditions are provided at these factories before making those purchases!
Why is it difficult for companies to track their supply chains?
The fashion industry is a multi-trillion-dollar global market that relies on many different suppliers to design, make and deliver goods. It’s is a complex, globalized, and interconnected network. It’s also relatively unregulated. There are hardly any universal transparency standards across countries or supply chains.
And companies can only control their suppliers’ ethical standards if they know what they’re doing and where they’re doing it. To be sure that products are being made under ethical conditions, companies would need to know where everything comes from. The problem here is that it’s difficult for companies to keep track of their vast network of suppliers and manufacturers.
As a result, there’s little traceability for most products that end up on your doorstep — or at least not enough to tell you where they came from or what was done to make them.
Can technology help brands improve supply chain transparency?
There’s lots we can do to bring greater transparency and traceability to the fashion industry. Technology can help improve supply chain transparency in many ways, starting with how brands collect information and communicate it with their customers.
For example, blockchain technology can be used to track the origin of materials and their journey through the supply chain.
Artificial intelligence and computer vision can also be used for this purpose by analyzing photos or videos from factory floors and pinpointing any issues with quality control.
RFID tags allow you to monitor each step along your production process in real time, making it possible for companies of any size to achieve greater efficiency in logistics management.
Finally, enterprise software like ERP (Enterprise Resource Planner) or PLM (Product Lifecycle Management) offer a cost-effective way of digitalizing operations throughout all functions of your business — including supply chain management — and integrating them into one platform so that everything is centralized under one roof instead of having different departments using different systems independently from one another.
Conclusion
While the fashion industry certainly has a long way to go, technology is helping change things for the better. By using artificial intelligence, brands will be able to better understand their own supply chains, which makes it easier for them to make changes that benefit everyone — consumers included.
