What is the Fair Wear Brand Performance Check?

Fair Wear’s Brand Performance Check annually checks and reports on how member brands implement the Code of Labour Practices. This Code consists of eightlabour rights, such as ‘safe and healthy working conditions’ and ‘no excessive working hours’. Fair Wear focuses on the ‘cut-make-trim’ part of the supply chain, where fabric is cut, sewn together, washed and finished with prints or embroidery. This is the labour-intensive part of clothing production. Besides, it’s also where we have the most direct influence over working conditions.

Kuyichi’s efforts and potential improvements per category

Foundational systems criteria

The first category checks the basic requirements for Fair Wear membership. For instance, each Fair Wear member brand must have a publicly available Human Rights Due Diligence Policy and a designated person responsible for social compliance. Staff should be aware of and trained about Fair Wear requirements, and brands should follow Fair Wear’s policies around supplier transparency and communication. 

Sourcing strategy

The Brand Performance Check shows that we focus on long-term relationships with our suppliers. We have a clear policy for checking potential suppliers, which includes a risk assessment. We onboard new suppliers through Kuyichi training to make sure they understand Fair Wear requirements and Kuyichi’s way of working. Fair Wear recommends improving our product risk scoping and including the voice of workers and stakeholders more.

Identifying continuous human rights risks

In the last couple of years, we’ve worked hard to improve our risk assessment for all our suppliers, including subcontractors. Since 2022, we have been part of the Fair Wear research project on gender equality and living wages in the garment sector of Türkiye. We have a supplier evaluation system for social and environmental compliance. Besides, we map out our entire supply chain for every product and have systems to avoid unauthorised subcontracting. Fair Wear recommends that we further expand our supplier risk evaluation system and how compliance is weighed in their total performance.

Responsible purchasing practices

Purchasing practices are all brand’s actions that influence working conditions at suppliers. Sustainability and social responsibility are woven throughout Kuyichi’s processes. For instance, we have shared production planning with suppliers, spread production throughout the year where possible, and ensured that the wage part of prices is non-negotiable. With the Responsible Contracting Project, we’ve worked on making our Code of Conduct two-way to highlight shared responsibilities for both the Supplier and Kuyichi. Fair Wear recommends including payment terms in our Code of Conduct. 

Quality and coherence of prevention and remediation system

At the Per supplier, we make action plans to improve working conditions, mostly based on audits, visits and survey results. We actively follow up on the audit results of our suppliers, sometimes together with other brands. Fair Wear recommends that we further improve our action plans by adding more detailed actions, timelines and budgets and encouraging the involvement of worker representatives.

Improvement and prevention

Our action plans have defined actions to improve and prevent working conditions. For instance, we regularly assess our purchasing practices to prevent possible excessive overtime, discrimination, etc., that could result from our behaviour. Fair Wear notices that we still have to define a systemic and time-bound approach to work on living wages at our suppliers and suggests we perform more supplier training. 

Communication, transparency and evaluation

Fair Wear checks if the communication about Fair Wear on our website and social media is in line with their policy. Our annual social report is up to Fair Wear standards. We also have internal and supplier evaluations in place. Fair Wear recommends Kuyichi to communicate about action plans in our social report and include worker feedback in our evaluation systems.

How does Fair Wear rank its member brands?

The Brand Performance Check is a list of questions with which you can score points. The results lead to a benchmarking score that puts you in one of these four categories: 

• Leader - “Brands that are doing exceptionally well and can show best practices in complex areas.”.

• Good - “Brands that are ‘doing good’, perform better than average clothing companies and work hard to improve labour conditions in their supply chain.” 

• Needs improvement - “Brands that are unable or unwilling to work on Code of Labour Practices implementation seriously.”.

• Suspended - “Failed to meet one of the basic requirements of Fair Wear membership.”.

This year, Kuyichi scored 74 points and was placed in the ‘Leader' category. We couldn’t be happier to receive recognition for the continuous efforts we put in together with our suppliers!