Social standards
For INK it is crucial that decent social standards are respected.
In order to assure this we work only with factories audited by reliable instances.
People and the planet
Next to the environmental impact, social standards are often a critical issue in the world of garment production.
Sweatshop apparel is so all-pervasive as to be almost invisible.
The availability of cheap, almost throwaway clothes that change with each fashion season has become deeply embedded in our culture but there is often a grim face behind this trend: since it’s now considered “too expensive” to pay a living wage and protect the environment, textile and clothing manufacturers have, for the most part, outsourced their production in the lowest-wage countries like Bangladesh, Vietnam, China and India where workers are often exploited: rights of free speech, free association, and the right to form a trade union are routinely repressed.
For INK it is crucial that decent social standards are respected. In order to assure this we work only with factories audited by reliable instances.
Moreover, having been active on the field ourselves we know most of the factories personally which gives us an additional assurance that the goods we sell are produced in decent conditions.
“Made in Bangladesh”
We have a preference to work with factories from Europe and the Mediterranean zone (Turkey, Morocco) for practical reasons (flexibility, reactivity).
This however does not mean that we boycott producers from Asia and the Indian subcontinent. The garment industry is a crucial part of the economy for countries like Bangladesh, so rather than boycott it we should strive to improve it.
As western world buyers we have a responsibility to help achieving this by supporting those factories that respect our social standards and aim to match them.
This requires in the first place that we pay an honest price, as this is often where things go wrong. The customer also bears a part of the responsibility here.
Someone who buys T-shirts at a price that barely covers the cost of the cotton it contents cannot expect that it has been produced in acceptable working conditions.