001. Third Party Inspection Companies with Co-host Jessie Li

We wanted to kick off this podcast series with an in-depth exploration of co-host Jessie’s experiences throughout the fashion supply chain. Jessie began her journey in the fashion supply chain working for a third-party quality inspection company in China. In this episode, we take a deep dive into the role of these third party inspection companies. What are they? Why do we have them? What’s their relationship to suppliers, or production facilities, and to brands?

We look at the grey zones inherent to quality inspection, and the way those grey zones can be exploited by different parties to reduce their risks. For example, the way that brands minimize the risk of excess inventory and poor sales performance by contractually tying their own sales performance to the quality and on-time delivery of the products from the factory. Although this might make sense on a theoretical level, we explore how it can be abused and directly contributes to the deterioration of trust and partnership across the supply chain.

Trust and ways of coping with risk are key themes that emerge, and while we certainly don’t have all the answers, we hope that by re-framing some of the questions we can gently prod conversations about sustainability in a different direction – as sustainability advocates we need to talk about this tension between risk and trust, and how we might be able to strike a better balance.

Photo provided by Pactics

Want to dig deeper ?

Read Kim's piece on how the drive to reduce risk within the fashion industry poses barriers to sustainability.

Read garment factory owner Mostafiz Uddin's piece on why contracts have no meaning.

Learn more about purchasing practices from Better Buying.

Read about how bringing vendors into the planning and ordering process could help reverse the current pandemic-induced crisis the industry is facing.

Read the Human Rights Watch report about order cancellations during Covid-19.

See which brands have agreed to pay for cancelled orders and which have not.

Photo provided by Pactics