NEWARK – In a new report released today, the Better Buying initiative finds that despite long-standing relationships between apparel retailers and manufacturers across South-East Asia and Bangladesh, suppliers continue to be squeezed by cost negotiations that, in some cases, fail to reflect regional wage rises.
The report, which focuses on eleven key sourcing locations and a further six broader regions, collates anonymous data supplied by factory bosses around the world to paint a representative picture of what business aspects – including order forecasting, costs, and management of purchasing process – have the greatest impacts on these businesses and their workers.
It finds that, for different reasons, Hong Kong, Southeast Asia, Turkey, the United Kingdom and the USA experience the ‘worst’ apparel buying practices, though the report’s author insists all nations should work to improve, saying that “supply chains of the future need to be designed to meet volatile market demands… these [supply chains] will also need to contribute positively to the environment and people making our products.”
