Fashion with Integrity

 

Our corporate responsibility programme, Fashion with Integrity (FWI) drives our transparent, responsible and inclusive approach to business. It’s how we work with others to transform the impact of fashion on people, animals and the environment.

We're expanding every year. This means we’re creating more jobs, helping local communities to prosper in the UK and overseas, and using our increasing influence to create and source more sustainable and inclusive products. What’s more, it puts us in the great position to use our influence as a force for good, promoting social change, diversity and self-confidence.

That said, we’re fully aware that these successes mean we also create more carbon emissions and waste and have a greater demand for natural resources. It also means we’re responsible for ensuring decent working conditions for an increasing number of supply chain workers, as well as the welfare of animals raised to produce the materials we use in our collections.

We embrace these challenges head on. By embedding FWI in every corner of our business and charging our senior leaders with responsibility for driving it forward we can decouple our global growth from our environmental footprint and make an increasingly positive difference to the lives of the people and animals connected with our business.
There are four pillars to the FWI programme which feed into our core business strategy and into how every ASOSer does their job:

Our Products: Respecting people, animals and the planet with great products that our customers can trust
Our Business: Achieving growth in a way that adds social value and minimises social impact
Our Customers: Giving young people the confidence to be whoever they want to be
Our Community: Investing time and resource to making a real difference in our communities

THE ASOS FOUNDATION

The ASOS Foundation provides infrastructure, training and support to enable disadvantaged young adults to reach their potential, through focused and sustainable projects in the UK, India and Kenya that create long-lasting change.

The Foundation has long-term charity partners including The Prince’s Trust, Centrepoint and Arrival Education in the UK, SOKO Community Trust and Wildlife Works Trust in rural Kenya and Udayan Care in New Delhi, India. Wherever we help, we hope to create sustainable and long-lasting change.

 

  • Ethical Trade

    To deliver our ambitious Ethical Trade programme, we've increased the headcount of our London and in-country Ethical Trade teams. We now have a team of 16 experts working together with third-party auditors in key product sourcing regions to understand country-specific issues, ensure our ethical standards are being upheld and regularly engage with local and international stakeholders. The entire team meet annually for strategy development, training and conferencing.

    We work closely with our Sustainable Sourcing team and Third-Party Brands team, as well as our retail teams to deliver ASOS’s Fashion with Integrity strategy.

  • Inclusion

    We’re committed to establishing a culture of inclusivity across ASOS, so that we truly represent the diversity of our customers in what we think, say and do.
    Accessible digital platforms: We’re continually reviewing our websites and apps to make sure that they’re accessible. We have a robust internal audit process in place which we bolster with insight from external organisations. We recently asked US digital accessibility experts, Accessibility 360, to undertake an audit of our site, and are using their findings to help us meet a site-wide target of achieving AA accessibility standards by 2020. We are working towards including accessibility considerations in every release of code for all of our digital platforms. In recent versions of our native apps, we’ve started to incorporate features such as screen readers, AA contrast ratios and dynamic text sizing.
    Inclusive products: We’re actively exploring how to make our product offering suitable for our customers who have a disability. This includes considering how we design adaptive, or accessible clothing and how we signpost existing products that possess accessible features.

  • Sustainable Business

    Carbon & Energy: Our carbon strategy, Carbon 2020, aims to reduce our carbon intensity every year until 2020. Carbon 2020 defines key ambitions for the business that focus on reducing our energy consumption, and delivery and packaging emissions, while increasing our renewable energy usage.

    Reducing carrier delivery emissions is an ongoing business priority for ASOS as the number of deliveries we make each year continues to rise. In 2016 we launched a strategy to work more closely with our carrier partners to help them better understand their environmental impacts and to make progress on reducing them. Together, we’re developing a platform that will enable us to calculate, track and report on carbon emissions from customer deliveries and returns. We’re also asking all carriers to create carbon reduction roadmaps in which they commit to undertaking at least three carbon reduction initiatives over a 12 month period.

    To reduce freight movements and associated emissions we’re building more fulfilment centres located within our biggest markets. Our new fulfilment centre in Germany now fulfils 92.3% of European orders (excluding the UK), and we’ve just opened another one in Atlanta, which will significantly lower emissions associated with US orders. We’ve also introduced 100% electric vehicles for the final leg of customer deliveries within the London congestion zone. Packaging & Waste: Our Environmental policy sets out our commitment to managing waste generated from our business operations according to the principles of reduce, reuse and recycle.
    As part of our responsibility as an online retailer, we are obligated to meet waste packaging (customer and transit), electrical, battery, textiles and glass recycling and recovery responsibilities globally. We’re currently covering over 30 territories. To meet our compliance obligations we follow rules which help to reduce the amount of packaging produced in the first place, reduce how much packaging waste goes to landfill and increase the amount of packaging waste that’s recycled and recovered.

  • Sustainable Sourcing

    We’re using our growing global reach to create, promote and sell products that are more socially and environmentally responsible. We’re also passionate about engaging our customers on sustainability.

    The continued growth of the Sustainable Sourcing team, which now consists of eleven sustainability experts, reflects ASOS’s level of ambition and commitment to embedding sustainability across all of the ASOS Brands.

    The team sits within ASOS’s Sourcing department and advise our retail teams and suppliers on how to design, source and innovate to create more sustainable products. The team also help our customers to reduce their own environmental footprint.

    Through participating in working groups and initiatives we’re able to better understand, measure and minimise our own impacts on the environment. Read more about the organisations we collaborate with here.
  • LGBTQ+:

  • GLAAD: We’ve partnered with GLAAD, the LGBTQ media advocacy organisation, to support ‘&Together Movement’ which promotes acceptance for all communities subject to discrimination. We collaborated with them on two gender-neutral clothing ranges with a percentage of the proceeds going to fund GLAAD’s work. So far, we’ve raised $220,000.

  • Stonewall: To help us further LGBTQ+ acceptance globally we’ve joined the Diversity Champions programme managed by Stonewall, Europe’s largest LGBTQ+ charity. In 2019, we’ll be participating in their Equality Index, an LGBTQ+ benchmarking assessment, and using the results to take positive action to improve the lives of LGBTQ+ people.

    ASOS marched at Pride in London and New York for the first time in 2018. Read more in our Celebrating Pride case study over on our PLC site.