Unlock stock picks and a broker-level newsfeed that powers Wall Street.
Can Cascale Promote Responsible Purchasing Practices at Scale?
Jasmin Malik Chua
6 min read
When Marsha Dickson, president of Better Buying Institute, decided to wind up her involvement in the purchasing practices platform she co-founded in 2019, she made a list of organizations that could continue—and ramp up—her work. Even through various iterations, there was always just one name at the top: Cascale, the multi-stakeholder organization formerly known as the Sustainable Apparel Coalition.
Better Buying Institute joined the nonprofit alliance as an affiliate member in 2022. Beginning Tuesday, the organization’s insight-gleaning methodologies and assets, including the Better Buying Purchasing Practices Index and the Better Buying Partnership Index, will sit alongside Cascale’s growing arsenal of Higg assessment tools as it begins its absorption into the larger body, staff members and all. Dickson herself will remain in an advisory role during the transition, but she’s confident that her legacy is in good hands because Cascale, like her, stockpiles data to inform its efforts around issues like sustainability and decent work.
“We also have a strong overlap of Better Buying subscribers and Cascale members,” she said. “So they look like the perfect partner to take on what we do, scale it and then even increase the impact.”
For Cascale, acquiring Better Buying Institute is likewise strategic. The 300-member-strong behemoth, whose members include high-roller brands such as H&M Group, Zara owner Inditex, Nike, Patagonia and Walmart, has made addressing supply chain inequities a tentpole topic, forging “strategic collaborations” with the likes of the International Apparel Federation and the Fair Wear Foundation to redress a power imbalance that overwhelmingly favors buyers and gives suppliers little leverage.
How all of these mesh up operationally is still a work in progress, admitted Colin Browne, the Under Armour vet who joined Cascale as CEO last May. In general terms, Cascale’s decent work pillar involves amplifying suppliers’ voices while fostering broader industry alignment on commercial practices to drive more ethical outcomes, he said. Realistically speaking, manufacturers already wrestling with increasing wages, due diligence expenses and material and energy costs continue to be throttled on pricing that barely covers—and at times undercuts—the cost of production, creating knock-on effects on worker welfare or potential safety and efficiency upgrades.
A recent Transformers Foundation report also spoke about the “cycle of exclusion” that multi-stakeholder organizations often engage in by favoring brands over “less powerful” suppliers in discussions, decisions and even the enforcement of basic membership requirements. Cascale, in its response to the paper, said it’s taking “concrete steps” to do better as “part of a longer journey” to muster “collective action at scale.”
It was the exacerbation of commercial pressures during the Covid-19 pandemic, in fact, that led the International Apparel Federation, Better Buying Institute and the Platform on Sustainable Textiles of the Asian Region to form the Sustainable Terms of Trade Initiative and lobby for a new code of conduct for buyers, perhaps through the use of model contract clauses, that gives manufacturers a stronger bargaining position. Talks around this are still ongoing, Browne said, though he thinks that an “evolving” set of principles work better in practice than a code that puts a “hard stop” on a direction.
“We’re working through the mechanics of getting the Better Buying team integrated into Cascale, so we’re not going to try and rush this and boil the ocean,” he said. “They’ll continue to run their program for the time being as we consult with our members to make sure it’s adding value to the overall ecosystem going forward.”
Browne said that by allowing suppliers to anonymously rate the purchasing practices of their buyers, the Better Buying tools enable greater transparency about the implications that poor examples such as truncated lead times, demands for steep discounts, canceled orders and extended payment terms can have for suppliers. Pairing them with the Higg modules, which for the most part measure a product or facility’s environmental performance, is a way for Cascale to “lean more aggressively into the social side” of how it’s supporting best practices, he added.
The idea behind the Better Buying Purchasing Practices Index and its ilk, Dickson said, is for brands to start amassing data that they can use inside a company to encourage accountability and encourage the continuous improvement of what can turn out to be systemic challenges. In short, “make things happen.”
“It’s no longer, ‘Oh, this is just one or two of our suppliers complaining; half our suppliers are having an issue here,’” she said. “The open-ended data that we collect gives such constructive feedback and points to changes that can automatically be made to improve the relationship between buyers and suppliers through that dialogue that happens, even though it’s anonymous.”
While the 45-plus brands that subscribed to Better Buying—Eileen Fisher is one, as is Reformation—are generally the types that appeal to the consciences of their consumers and want to improve their ethical profiles, Dickson said they also demonstrate that cultivating a better relationship between buyers and suppliers is possible. Doing so in a geopolitical climate rattled by massive economic uncertainty and increasing conservative blowback to the so-called “woke” agenda, including a chill over once-vaunted ESG practices, is arguably more critical than ever because the incentive to squeeze margins has never been higher.
“I know suppliers have said over the years that just being asked to participate in a survey by a buyer makes a big difference. It says, ‘Hey, they care about us; they’re going to stick with us for a while,’” she said. “The result is better business for everybody and a better ability to achieve the social and environmental goals that are embedded in any supply chain.”
Browne, slapping his supply chain hat on, agreed that the time for transactional dealings has passed, particularly now with the advent of legislation in the European Union and elsewhere that demands a deeper level of accounting, whether it has to do with climate emissions or workplace conditions. But it remains to be seen if the industry can progress beyond the dogged self-interest and “blah blah blah” of inaction that many suppliers that toil in the global South say is still deeply rooted in the neo-colonialist notion of West-knows-best.
“I think we are increasingly seeing the value in building closer relationships between brands and suppliers,” he said, making a hopeful counterpoint. “The more they can work together and can understand the challenges and the issues they both face, the more opportunities there are to optimize both the supply chain and, by default, the well-being of everyone that works within that supply chain.”
