Bestseller is a Danish family-owned clothing brand that has grown into a fast fashion giant since its founding in 1975. The company employs over 41,000 people and offers its fourteen brands in over 5,300 stores in 43 countries. With such a big name in the industry, comes big responsibility. It’s very unfortunate that this responsibility is not being taken at the moment. The mother company offers a single sustainability report that covers all of its nearly twenty brands. This report is mainly filled with fragmented information about what specific brands do well, but lacks a general representation of the performance of either the mother company or the individual brands on sustainable practises. This makes it nearly impossible to gain insight into how the company is doing and what it is actually implementing. The company has made small steps by implementing a Code of Conduct to ensure basic labor rights and publishing a list of suppliers, but information about its carbon footprint, material sourcing, workers’ rights or animal welfare is mostly missing.
When a brand doesn’t offer any information, there are several risks you take as a consumer. For example, the climate impact of that particular brand or product can be much higher compared to industry peers. The company might use certain harmful chemicals or there might be animals or humans harmed for the manufacturing of the product. For these reasons, we believe that you should be aware of how products are produced and how a company as a whole operates in regard to our pillars. When there’s no transparency, you are at risk of supporting some or more of the harmful conditions mentioned above.
