“As an owner and founder of a company that makes products during a time when the world is screaming for less of everything (less pollution, less CO2, less product, less things in landfills, less plastic), I do not take lightly the responsibility we hold as a brand,” says our co-founder and Chief Impact Officer, Kerry Docherty. “At all levels, all the time, we need to ensure that the decisions we make are responsible and environmentally and sociologically conscious. The health of the planet is also our human health.”
Every day, the Faherty team makes small, intentional decisions that make not only our brand but the fashion industry at large better, including: fabric selection that prioritizes lower-impact materials; packaging decisions that move away from plastic, production processes that focus on circularity, and choosing responsible dye processes. “We have not yet ‘arrived’ at being the best, but we are committed to making things better, year after year,” Kerry adds.
So here are some of the current initiatives we have underway.
RESPONSIBLE SOURCING
As members of Textile Exchange—a global nonprofit helping brands, farmers, manufacturers, and retailers produce goods responsibly—we are continuously transitioning to preferred fibers, opting for more and more organic cotton, recycled polyester, and responsibly-sourced viscose in our products.
We are partnering with our manufacturers to improve their environmental and social performance, while using the environmental self-assessment tool, HIGG Index, to measure the impact of our own facilities, materials, and products.
We are committed to the CANOPY PACK4GOOD initiative, which is helping us implement solutions around reducing our packaging and protecting endangered forests.
CIRCULARITY
To recycle our textile waste and divert it from landfills, we work with FABSCRAP, a New York City and Philadelphia-based organization that helps companies reuse and recycle their textile scraps.
We’ve teamed up with garment recovery service Hemster to help you have a more circular wardrobe, by adding more than three years to the lifespan of our pants with free hemming and alterations.
We donate excess inventory to a variety of nonprofit partners to ensure that clothing goes to people and communities that need it. Some past recipients of our donations include American Indian Community Development Corporation (AICDC), Good360, Lakota Way Healing Center, and The Other Side Academy (TOSA). Our Native-designed materials specifically go back to Native creative entrepreneurs and their communities to make other products, as authentically Native-designed materials are hard to come by.
And this spring, we’ll be launching our first-ever circularity program that extends the lifetime of all Faherty garments, so stay tuned.
ENERGY & EMISSIONS
100% of our store electricity uses Green-e® Certified Renewable Energy,which we buy credits for annually. We’re also working on measuring our cross-company carbon footprint.
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