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The modern garment supply chain is immensely complex and conventional “Made In” labels offer a dangerously simplified truth. Instead, we trace every step of our garments’ creation, from farm to finish line, so that we at ASKET, and you as an individual, can make informed decisions about the clothing we choose to invest in. The journey started in May 2018, and while we failed our ambitious goal to be 100% traceable by 2019, we've been making steady progress. In 2021 we went from 85% to 92,5% traceability across the board and in 2022 we made it up to 96%. Going into 2023, we redefined our traceability standard to be even tougher, bringing our score down to 89% - it's not that we know less, rather that we acknowledge that there's even more to trace.
Head down to see our progress and learn more.
Overall product traceability
Full Traceability is our garment origin disclosure standard, requiring us to split out every component in a garment, identify every process in creating a component and locate the facility at which the processes occur. A trim (e.g. sewing thread, button, fusing, tape, zipper) is broken down into its material extraction and the component production. A fabric (body fabrics and linings) is broken down into the yarns it's made up of and traced from farming or recycling, through spinning, dyeing, knitting or weaving to any finishing processes. The garment construction per se is broken down into cutting, sewing or linking, washing and packing. It is, by definition, FULL traceability - every step is accounted for. The only exemption to date is the dye stuff, chemicals and stones used in dyeing and washing processes. They're not physical components of the end-product, but we do hope to start tracing them eventually too.
We trace by traveling and visiting facilities across the world, issuing questionnaires and collecting certificates of origin.
To track our progress, we report a traceability score on each product, as well as an average traceability of our entire collection. With over 50 garments in our permanent collection, we've identified 1000 processes and traced 250 individual facilities to date.
We group the traceability score of a garment's major components (body fabric, lining and their yarns) into three manufacturing tiers - Raw Material, Milling and Manufacturing. Minor components (sewing threads, buttons, zippers, fusing etc.), are bundled into a fourth tier - Trims.
A product's traceability score is the average traceability of all facilities involved in creating the product and each of its components. The more components in a product, and the more facilities involved in creating the components, the more complex it gets.
A facility is fully traced (100%) when we know the facility's legal entity name and its location, it is 2/3 traced (67%) if we know the region or city of the facility and 1/3 traced (33%) if we only know the country of the facility. A facility is 0% traced, if we know if its existence, but have no further information.
Raw Material, tier 3, is the extraction and preparation of fibres. It includes GOTS certified cotton and linen farming, ginning or retting, to RWS certified merino sheep farming, shearing and wool scouring, Tencell™ Lyocell production from wood fibres and in the case of recycled fibres, the recycling process. To learn more about our choice of fibers, head to our materials section.
Milling, tier 2, is the creation of the main yarns and fabrics - both body fabrics and linings. Processes stretch from mechanical or chemical recycling, fiber combing, yarn spinning, twisting, dyeing and weaving or knitting all the way to the finished yarn or fabric roll.
Manufacturing, tier 1, includes all steps from finished yarns or fabrics to final garment: knitting (for fully fashioned knits), cutting, sewing or linking, washing, pressing and packing.
Trims, refer to the remaining components of a garment: Sewing thread, labels, hangtags, buttons and zips. Due to the difficulty in tracing trims, we look to identify the facilities involved in two simplified processes: material extraction and trim production.
As per our Principles, all Manufacturing and Milling facilities are visited and documented personally. That means we can show off our amazing factory partners and give you a glimpse of what it takes to create garments free of compromise. Below is just a fraction of our factories, head to our factories page to view all of them.
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