Ethics and Practice
We own some of our production facilities, and outsource some of our production to small workshops. Some of these small workshops sure do look like what I thought a sweat shop would look like before I saw the real thing. They tend to be family owned, with either family members as employees or people from the same village, town or religious community.
We choose small shops where the quality is the best, and where we know we can make a positive impact on their lives. I don't want the rest of the planet to hate Americans or Westerners based on cartoons or movies. We take the time to introduce our workers to our culture and to the culture of the mountains as much as possible. I doubt I'll ever succeed in getting one of our machine operators to go ice climbing. That said, getting them out for a day hike has had an immense effect on the quality of production and their understanding of what my goals are in terms of production. They can sew straight and they can sew accurately and now maybe they have an certain degree of empathy with who they are sewing for: our customers.
There has to be a balance between making money, selling quality product at decent prices, and taking care of our employees and the rest of the world.
We feel that mixing outsourcing and ownership is the best way to accomplish this balance. Outsourcing is seen as the form of nasty globalization, where factories have thousands of employees locked in a building making sporting goods equipment for North America and Europe. Locking people up to make them work is plain out wrong. So are factory stores and factory dorms. Work can, and should, be kind of fun.
We feel the right thing to do is to give a small workshop work, providing them the chance to grow and to succeed and profit. Everybody should have the chance to succed. In our production facilities in Turkey, the tailors are highly experienced professionals, most with at least five years experience with the fabrics found in our products. They know that if we fail at design, quality control or even at marketing, there won't be more work. And they tell me they like the work and they've enjoyed learning about Americans.
While they’re not climbers, they are damn good at what they do, and they do care about the quality of their product.
Nobody working behind a sewing machine wants their children to follow in their footsteps--one of the machine operators has a kid who wants to be a high fashion designer, but that's a different thing altogether...
We choose small shops where the quality is the best, and where we know we can make a positive impact on their lives. I don't want the rest of the planet to hate Americans or Westerners based on cartoons or movies. We take the time to introduce our workers to our culture and to the culture of the mountains as much as possible. I doubt I'll ever succeed in getting one of our machine operators to go ice climbing. That said, getting them out for a day hike has had an immense effect on the quality of production and their understanding of what my goals are in terms of production. They can sew straight and they can sew accurately and now maybe they have an certain degree of empathy with who they are sewing for: our customers.
There has to be a balance between making money, selling quality product at decent prices, and taking care of our employees and the rest of the world.
We feel that mixing outsourcing and ownership is the best way to accomplish this balance. Outsourcing is seen as the form of nasty globalization, where factories have thousands of employees locked in a building making sporting goods equipment for North America and Europe. Locking people up to make them work is plain out wrong. So are factory stores and factory dorms. Work can, and should, be kind of fun.
We feel the right thing to do is to give a small workshop work, providing them the chance to grow and to succeed and profit. Everybody should have the chance to succed. In our production facilities in Turkey, the tailors are highly experienced professionals, most with at least five years experience with the fabrics found in our products. They know that if we fail at design, quality control or even at marketing, there won't be more work. And they tell me they like the work and they've enjoyed learning about Americans.
While they’re not climbers, they are damn good at what they do, and they do care about the quality of their product.
Nobody working behind a sewing machine wants their children to follow in their footsteps--one of the machine operators has a kid who wants to be a high fashion designer, but that's a different thing altogether...
