UPDATE: lululemon has decided to take the results of this audit off their website.
Currently lululemon has factories all over the world, in Canada, China, S.Korea, Vietnam, Indonesia, Peru, Taiwan, Israel, and Thailand to be exact. With so much labor being done overseas, I was interested to know just how they were evaluating their labor standards. Apparently they have hired a new Global Director of Sourcing & Manufacturing to watch over international factory compliance and ensure that working conditions are fair. I was excited to see that on the lululemon factory partnerships website they list the most recent review of the factories (audited by an external agencies):
Factories were ranked in areas of labour, health and safety, and environmental responsibility. The total score is out of a possible 100:
Factory 1: 78/100
Factory 2: 83/100
Factory 3: 92/100
Factory 4: 51/100
Factory 5: 55/100
Factory 6: 61/100
Factory 7: 80/100
These scores are are less than stunning, however, the corrective action that lululemon plans to take actually is quite impressive:
To meet our quality and workplace standards, and to compliment these official audits, lululemon will continue to monitor factory performance on a regular basis. Our goal in factory compliance is to improve working conditions wherever we manufacture through communication and commitment, not through penalty. If challenges have come to light through our audits, we will work with our factories to come up with solutions that further our goal of long-lasting manufacturing relationships. Our quality assurance team, social responsibility team and production managers will continue to diligently train our factory workers or third parties on our audit approach so that we openly and continually communicate our quality and Code of Conduct standards. By sharing our training tools and our ethical requirements and by promoting open conversations towards Code compliance, we will build solid and mutually beneficial factory partnerships.
courtesy of lululemon.com (page now removed)
I found their solution to be quite refreshing. This is definitely a website that I will follow up with to see how changes are being made. Kudos to lulu for making the whole process - trial and error and all - so visible.
Hey - this is going to sound stupid, but are you sure this was on their site? The link is dead and when I emailed them about it, they said they haven’t gotten their audit results yet.
Thanks for the update sangi.
Yes - it appears as though they have taken this link off of their website. The results posted on the website may have been outdated.
We updated the post. Thanks!