Icebreaker’s response to our Who Makes Your Clothes? campaign.
Read the letter we sent Icebreaker here.
Dear Sarah and Good magazine,
Thank you for your letter inquiring about Icebreaker and other companies’ commitment to ethics and transparency in manufacturing.
Icebreaker is a New Zealand company that has been built on a product with deep integrity.
It starts with our growers who are required to meet our strict standards on environmental management, animal welfare, and wool quality.
Our supply chain is then set up to ensure that our contract manufacturers meet our ethical and social standards on clean manufacturing technologies, fair treatment of workers, and garment quality. Our focus is to work with a few contractors to ensure that our relationship with them is narrow and deep.
We also work to ensure we have environmental certifications, such as Oeko-Tex and ISO, and have water purification, heat reclamation and recycling as part of our operational practices.
We share videos of our supply chain and our manufacturing standards online.
Baacode, our online traceability programme begun in 2008, demonstrates our commitment to environmental and social ethics to our customers. We’re able to tell on our website the story of our garments all the way through the supply chain.
Our customers tell us how much they appreciate being able to meet merino growers at high country New Zealand sheep stations, see how the workers who made their garments are treated, and learn about clean manufacturing technologies. Ultimately, it’s about letting our customers know that their garments were made with deep integrity.
Like everything there is always an opportunity to improve on what we do, we are not perfect, but we are proud of what we have achieved so far.
We are always asking ourselves; how do you build the cleanest clothing company on the planet?
It is what we are striving to do because our customers care and it’s the right thing to do.
Best wishes,
Jeremy Moon
Icebreaker CEO and Founder
