Berghaus

How sustainable is Berghaus?

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

Ber­ghaus is a Bri­tish out­door brand that’s owned by Bri­tish Pent­land Group, a Bri­tish fashion com­pa­ny that owns around twelve brands. The brand does offer a bit more infor­ma­tion than its mother com­pa­ny on its web­site. There is infor­ma­tion avai­lable about bet­ter packa­ging and it states more sources for ani­mal mate­rials. Ber­ghaus also offers a life­time gua­ran­tee on its pro­ducts, which gains them some points. But for most infor­ma­tion we have to resort to Pent­land Group’s sus­tai­na­bi­li­ty report that unfor­tu­na­te­ly leaves a lot of blanks.

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.