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Our Mission
Boden’s mission is to inspire our customers to live their best lives. We do this through the way our clothes make you look and feel. We want to minimise our impact on the planet while seeking to grow sales and make a profit.
We try to look after the people we work with, both within the company and in our supply chains throughout the world and out intention is to always treat people fairly and with respect.
We design clothes that make people look and feel fantastic, manufacturing them to a high-quality standard in a fair and safe working environment, using planet friendly fabrics and techniques. Everything Boden makes is made to last.
The measure of the true environmental damage of an item of clothing should be determined by the impact of its production divided by the number of times it is worn. True financial value can be determined similarly by the cost divided by number of times worn. Boden aims to deliver outstanding value on both these measures.
The three most significant environmental and social issues in the fashion industry are the conditions of production workers, waste produced in the manufacturing process and the reckless wastage of huge quantities of clothing which end up in landfill each year.
We aim to minimise these issues and, to balance our impact, we make clothes that last. We aim to do more than other businesses to make sure Boden clothes are worn for longer and do not end up in landfill. In addition to our ‘Care, Repair and Re-wear’ programme to extend the life of our products, we also work with charities to re-purpose and/or recycle any clothing that has reached the end of its natural life.
Because we make clothes that last, we believe the more people wearing them the better it is for the planet.
A Boden sale is not complete until the product is worn out and recycled after many, many happy years of enjoyment.
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Carbon
To be carbon neutral by 2025 for Scope 1 and 2.
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Product
To have 80% of our products made from sustainably sourced material by 2025.
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Packaging
For all our packaging to be recycled and recyclable by 2025.
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Landfill
To avoid product and waste being sent to landfill, we are aiming for 100% of product and over 90% of our waste to have routes that avoid landfill by 2025
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Supply Chain
Our aim is that over 90% of people working at our manufacturers will have access to either the HER project
or &Wider by 2030 -
People
We inspire our staff to live their best lives with an amazing onboarding experience, engagement and wellbeing activities and access to development
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Community
We’ll donate 0.5 to 0.75% of
our yearly profit to charity.
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Carbon
In 2023 we continued to be carbon neutral for Scope 1 and 2 three years earlier than planned. It was done by reducing our carbon footprint and off-setting the remainder, using gold accredited projects to do so.
Our footprint in 2023 was under 800 tonnes of carbon, down from 2400 when we first measured it in 2019. We off-set the 800 tonnes by investing in a windfarm in India. India was chosen as some of our clothes are manufactured in this country.
We also finished the measurement of our Scope 3 footprint. This came out as 84,000 tonnes. We are working out a plan for how best to work with our partners to reduce this. Two things worth noting on our total carbon footprint. Firstly 40% of the footprint is due to the growing and making of the raw materials and is difficult to get away from. This very much supports our long-held approach of designing and making product that last and can be worn again and again. Secondly, in some cases we are having to balance the challenges of biodiversity, carbon footprint and the impact on the local people. There can often be a tension between these three elements, and we are trying to make decisions based on doing the right thing overall, rather than just one factor.
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Product
In 2023 we consolidated the gains we had made in 2022 and continued to make progress in many other areas. Our pieces are certified by 6 of the industry’s most reliable certifications: GCS, RWS, RMS, Lenzing, BCI, and LWG.
The major areas we consolidated on were:
- All of our 100% Cashmere fabric was to the Good Cashmere Standard certified.
- Boden is now Responsible Animal Fibre Standard certified. This covers Responsible Wool and Responsible Mohair.
- All of the Nylon and polyester in our swimwear outers and linings was recycled
New areas of progress were:- All of our 100% Linen Fabric is made from 20% Recycled Linen, which is a great new initiative and Boden is one of the first to implement this.
- We have doubled our use of Lenzing EcoVera Viscose within our overall viscose use from 6.7% to 12% which we are very proud of, as well as increasing our use of the more sustainable wood pulp fibres such as Modal and Lyocell from 0.4% to 5% of our overall fabric use.
- All of our children’s polyester outerwear style outers and lining are made from Recycled Polyester.
- We are using recycled polyester where possible and hope to expand this into new categories. We are also continuing to have 20% recycled cotton in all our Women’s Denim styles
- Cotton is our most used fabric, and we continue to be part of the Better Cotton Initiative. Currently, we are improving the reporting processes both internally and within our supply base.
We are members of the LWG (Leather Working Group) for our leather goods, who help combat deforestation and improve traceability. Over 95% of leather sourced in 2023 was from a LWG Tannery.
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Packaging
We have continued on with our sustainable journey in 2023 and one of biggest achievements this year, has been to “close the loop” with our dispatch bag and box suppliers for our UK warehouse. All cardboard and polythene waste are collected by our suppliers, the material recycled and used to make new Boden packaging. This provides complete transparency of the disposal of our waste satisfying our GDPR requirements. This move has also given Boden a modest saving, which is very satisfactory as being sustainable is often seen as costly.
To assist with the move to “Closed Loop” we standardised our recycling within the warehouse, so all the workstations have the same recycling and all staff retrained to know what can and cannot be recycled. (Note we are working on the last few items that cannot be recycled to remove or find alternatives).
We continued to remove or reduce, completing the removal of returns labels in orders for all markets (except Australia) with the switch to Rebound. Including the UK and US, this saved approximately 44 tonnes of paper. In 2023 we switched to packing paper made from 100% recycled paper and in September we trialled a new size of tissue; this will save use 44% less paper (5 tonnes) when we switch to this new size in 2024. And finally, all our pre-printed labels are now double sided reducing the backing by 50%.
We have made good progress for our UK operation, but we are having trouble replicating some of these advances in the US. For instance, the closed loop process is not available locally to where we are based. We are continuing to look for options. -
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Supply Chain
Boden has products made in countries around the world. The Responsible Sourcing team at Boden work with our suppliers to ensure that the people who are making our products are protected and respected. The standards we expect are laid out in our Responsible Sourcing Commitment.
In 2023 we successfully completed mapping of our tier 2 and 3 supply chain and have started to ask the tier 1 factories we work with to claim their facilities on the Open Supply Hub. This helps make our supply chain more transparent and gives factory management ownership over their data.
With the data from the supply chain, we have been able to identify commonalities between factories which has helped us to prioritise resource. We made reasonable progress on this but fell short of our target. For our tier 1 factories we were hoping to get 70% onto the Open Supply Hub, but only hit 43%.
We have continued the rollout of supplier projects focused on worker voice through &Wider and female empowerment through RISE (formerly called the HERproject). We increased the number of projects to 33% out of all of our factories, up from 27% in 2022. We have been looking at other projects to improve the supplier/customer relationship and will report on progress in 2024.
In addition to the work we have been doing within our supply chain we have also been working with our peers to standardise information gathering from suppliers. An issue for suppliers has been multiple partners asking for similar data in slightly different formats. This can cause some push back from them on completing this work.
Finally, the team started looking at Boden’s environmental impact within the factories we use by creating a sheet that looks at energy and water usage based on number of products made. Our next steps will be looking how we use this data in a more product specific way.
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Landfill
Our aim is to avoid our product or our waste going to landfill.
For our product we already design and manufacture them to make them last. We then look to extend their life with our Care, Repair and Re-wear programme. This was launched in 2021 for the UK and in 2023 400 items were sent to us to repair. The oldest item returned to us for repair this year was bought from Boden in 2004. It was a wrap coat. The lining had degraded overtime, so we replaced it and sent it back to the customer to carry on wearing.
For end of line stock we work with charities to make sure none of it is sent to landfill and we also run a Pass It On programme for our customers, whereby they can send items back that they no longer want, for an account credit. We then include these in our donations to charities or have the products recycled. We had nearly 3,000 items returned to us by customers in the year.
Of the waste that we generate across our three sites we either recycle it, send it to be used for power generation or send it to landfill. In 2023 we manage to reduce our waste by over 10% to 571 tonnes. For the waste we generated it was split out as:
- 92% Recycled (vs 89% in 22)
- 2% for Power Generation
- 6% to Landfill
We continue to look at ways to reduce our waste across our sites. -
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People
We have continued to embed our new approach to performance management to give our people greater attention to their performance and achievements. We set goals, have regular 1-1s, and encourage everyone to seek peer feedback. Our Workday system supports us in this process. Every month, we communicate to our people about business priorities, celebrate career moves and long service. We also give out regular awards to our staff through all of our sites, recognising outstanding achievements.
We are proud of the development initiatives we have in place. We have launched a 12-month training programme for our middle level managers to cover areas such as Leading at Boden, Setting Expectations and Difficult Conversations. Around 50 people leaders are taking part in the training.
In 2023 we continued the success of our apprenticeship scheme in Leicester. We saw 26 Warehouse Operatives completing and passing their Level 2 qualification and 4 Customer Service Advisors passing their Level 2 with distinctions.
The above work has all been positive, but there is no getting away from the fact that it has been a tough year for Boden. Our financial loss in 2023 was our largest ever. This led to a tough year of cost cutting, a lot of hard work and no bonuses. The team fared well overall, but we are looking for a more positive environment in 2024.
Throughout the year, we have a full calendar of events that support engagement, community, and education with internal and external speakers. For example, we dedicated October to a month of well-being with different themes each week. We have employee-led groups such as Belonging at Boden and the Green Team.
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Community
We are committed to giving between 0.5-0.75% of our profit to charity. Unfortunately we made no profit in 2022 so we had little money to give away in 2023. What we did give was some vouchers to support small charities that our customers were working with.
This meant our main charitable contributions were our end of line clothing donations. We gave approximately 90,000 items of clothing to charity. Of this over 3000 items of clothing were sent to us by our UK customers that they no longer needed.
In the UK the main charities we support with our end of line clothing are:- The National Police Aid Charity
- Scope
- New Life
- British Humanitarian Aid
- Matthew 25 Ministries
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