Red or Dead

How sustainable is Red or Dead?

This scree­ning has been done by Fai­rify on June 12^th 2020

Red or Dead is a play­ful Bri­tish foot­wear and spec­ta­cles brand. It’s been owned by Bri­tish Pentland Group sin­ce 1995, a glo­bal fashion com­pany that owns about twel­ve brands. The group publishes a yearly sus­tai­na­bi­lity report that covers all of the­se brands. Unfor­tu­na­tely, this report doesn’t offer much rele­vant infor­ma­tion.

It remains lar­gely unk­nown whe­re the company’s mate­rials ori­gi­na­te. The com­pany sta­tes to work with blue­sign and Oeko-Tex to res­pon­sibly mana­ge che­mi­cals, but doesn’t offer any infor­ma­tion about what mate­rials it’s using in its pro­duc­tion pro­cess. Whether the com­pany uses more sus­tai­na­ble mate­rials like orga­nic cot­ton or any recy­cled mate­rials, remains unk­nown and sug­gests that the­se per­cen­ta­ges are very low. It does sta­te that 60% of its current mate­rials are sour­ced from pre­fe­rred sup­pliers, which is a very gene­ric sta­te­ment. On sour­cing of ani­mal mate­rials, the com­pany sta­tes that it uses leather, down and feathers in line with industry best prac­ti­ces and that it’s a mem­ber of the Leather Wor­king Group. But actual per­cen­ta­ges of cer­ti­fied ver­sus non-cer­ti­fied mate­rial are not spe­ci­fied, which rai­ses con­cerns about ani­mal wel­fa­re in its supply chain.

The com­pany is not obli­vious to cli­ma­te action and has a tar­get for cut­ting emis­sions by 25% by 2025 and aims to achie­ve car­bon neu­tra­lity by 2050. But becau­se Pentland Group doesn’t report on supply chain emis­sions and current envi­ron­men­tal per­for­man­ce, it seems very far away from achie­ving this goal. It does report that JD Sports, its sports and shoes retai­ler, per­forms well on the Car­bon Dis­clo­su­re Pro­ject, but doesn’t pro­vi­de rele­vant infor­ma­tion for its enti­re ope­ra­tions. The repor­ting sty­le of the com­pany is very frag­men­ted and seems to cherry-pick the posi­ti­ves from each brand, lea­ving out fac­tual infor­ma­tion of its enti­re ope­ra­tions, which is frankly unfair and not trans­pa­rent. What we can tell is that Pentland Group has adop­ted the Higg Modu­le in 13% of its fac­to­ries, which is a start to mea­su­ring and impro­ving envi­ron­men­tal per­for­man­ce of its fac­to­ries and an impor­tant step towards cal­cu­la­ting its car­bon foot­print.

Pentland Group is a mem­ber of the Ethi­cal Tra­ding Initia­ti­ve, which con­ducts inde­pen­dent audits for the com­pany, and has part­ne­red with ACT to impro­ve living wages in its supply chain. Des­pi­te the­se mem­berships, the lack of trans­pa­rency con­ti­nues in its repor­ting about social audits. The com­pany sta­tes it con­duc­ted 104 audits in 2018, six­teen of which were con­duc­ted by Bet­ter Work. Who con­duc­ted the other 88 audits is uns­pe­ci­fied. Becau­se the com­pany only publishes its tier 1 sup­plier list, which yields 188 results, it appears that there’s a part of com­ple­tely unau­di­ted fac­to­ries in its supply chain. Pentland Group does sha­re the results of the con­duc­ted audits and from the 104 con­duc­ted audits it iden­ti­fied 21 zero tole­ran­ce issues in 2018 and 31% of ins­tan­ces were clas­si­fied as cri­ti­cal. The cul­mi­na­tion of the­se facts rai­ses serious con­cerns about labor rights in the company’s supply chain.

Pentland Group does make an effort to give back to com­mu­ni­ties and gives at least 1% of net pro­fits after taxes to cha­ri­ties each year, which is great, but the­re are currently some serious con­cerns about how the com­pany ope­ra­tes. We hope more trans­pa­rency and more impro­ve­ments are made in 2020.

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