The House of LR&C | Our Impact

For us, this means we’re designing products with less damaging environmental and social impacts, creating an inclusive workplace, empowering women and girls, supporting the fair treatment of all people, preserving the environment, and advancing ethical business practices through fashion-industry collaborations.

The House of LR&C brands must deliver on at least three of these goals:

Our Chief Sustainability Officer sets the strategy and the team including everyone from our CEO to the-best-of-the-best product developers, sourcing experts, raw-material innovators, and brand sustainability experts bring it to life. We also lean on external experts with decades of experience in raw material and fabric innovation, supply chain and accreditation to support us and keep us honest. (no greenwashing here!)

We created four categories that classify how we operate within each main stage in a product’s life cycle (design, manufacturing, packaging, distribution and consumer use): Never, Basic, Better, Best.

The Never category includes non-negotiables like suppliers that use child labor, human trafficking, and bonded labor, or suppliers that don’t have pollution-mitigation measures in place. We’re working on hitting the Best category across the board, but we know it’ll take some time to get there. 

E.g., we know that two-thirds of a product’s total impact is based on the materials used to make it. So, our Goods Mandate requires over 70% of our materials come from the Better and Best buckets.

What is a B-Corp?
Certified B Corporations are for-profit companies that meet the highest standards of social and environmental performance, transparency, and accountability—as determined by B Lab®, a nonprofit dedicated to creating a more equitable and regenerative economy for everyone. B Corps are helping redefine what success means in the business sector (balancing profit and purpose) to build a more inclusive and sustainable economy.

Why Does It Matter?
Becoming a B Corp directly aligns with—and keeps us focused on—our mission to create large-scale positive impact on people and the planet by providing third-party accountability. B Corp certification means we’re living up to (and into) a rigorous set of social and environmental standards when it comes to our industry. Kind of like what the Fair Trade certification tells you about a food item or an organic certification says about cotton.

How Does This Affect You?
You deserve to know who you’re working for, buying from, and investing in. Our certification is a legally binding, third party-verified promise to you that we’ll always strive for better, for more sustainable options, for more Love, Respect, & Care—for people and the planet.

To learn more about our certification, visit our B Corp page.

We also use DRIPSHIELD™—an anti-stain, odor-resistant technology—on key items to help reduce washing. All packaging is 100% compostable or recycled. And in fall 2021, we introduced natural dyes to the collection.

We’ll work to increase this number to over 90% in the next 18-24 months as we bring on new partners and further invest in fabric technologies.

Investing in fewer, higher-quality items, wearing them more often, and holding onto them for longer helps to minimize your carbon footprint. Easing the demand for a constant stream of new things can also help reduce pollution and slow the depletion of natural resources.

Washing less often, at lower temps, in larger loads, and hanging to dry could cut a garment’s footprint by about 7%. Less laundering also means keeping your stuff looking and feeling good for longer.

Plus, by repairing instead of replacing, you’ll save some cash and help support small businesses. If you can’t find a tailor nearby, sites like SUAY and The Cobblers offer mail-in repair services. And if you’re looking to give DIY a go, check out free tutorials from sites like iFixit. Mending keeps your stuff looking and feeling good for longer.

Our Main Partners

• We created Community Closet with Friends of the Children, a nonprofit that gets product directly to kids and the friends who support them via nationwide chapters.
• Delivering Good, an organization that distributes donations through a network of 800+ community partners, helps us reach families affected by poverty, homelessness, foster care, domestic abuse, low literacy, military service, major illness, incarceration, and natural disasters.

Find out more about their sustainability goals:

• Nordstrom
• Kohl's

We’re proud to say that, so far, we've avoided using almost 300,000 square feet of tissue paper—or, as Russell would say, more than five football fields’ worth. We’ve also saved almost 1,000 plastic hangers. And rest assured: each item stays in the same bag from factory to doorstep. Because no repacking means less waste.  

A single-use poly bag can take 200 years or more to decompose. 

We’ve removed the use of hang tags entirely on Human Nation. We are working towards a similar solution for LITA by Ciara and Good Man Brand. And you know those little T-shaped fasteners that attach tags to clothes? We’ve moved away from plastic ones and use a product called “Echotachs” which are fully biodegradable. Because even the smallest things add up.

Unfortunately, mapping the ins and outs of an entire supply-chain system isn’t as easy as it sounds. They’re often very complex, and suppliers can be hesitant to share proprietary information. Regardless, we’re working towards 100% traceability with all our suppliers.

Where our stuff was made this year:

• India
• Italy
• China
• United States
• Colombia
• Cambodia
• Portugal
• Brazil

This list will change seasonally as we expand our network of partners.

To ensure we’re supporting our partners as they walk the walk, we’ve established several key practices:

Code of Conduct
Our Code of Conduct applies to any supplier performing services for or supplying products to us. It outlines our LR&C business principles and is consistent with the guidelines established by the International Labour Organization (ILO) Conventions, the Fair Labour Association (FLA) Code of Conduct, and the United Nations (UN) Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights. We also require compliance with all laws in each of the countries in which our factories operate. 

In-Person Visits
Pre-Covid, we took annual trips to our partner factories to get to know the people who help craft our products. When it’s safe to travel again, we’ll not only resume our factory visits, but expand our travels to include fabric-production mills and the farms where the journey begins. This is a crucial part of our work; we can’t wait to get back at it.  

Third-Party Audits
We’re working on a partnership with a world-leading, third-party inspection, verification, and certification company. They’ll take the lead, conducting independent audits across our entire supply chain to ensure our partners meet our high social-responsibility and environmental standards. We’ll begin implementation mid-to-late 2021. 

The Goods Mandate considers water input, energy input, land use, eco-toxicity, greenhouse gas emissions, human toxicity, availability, and price.

We source eco-friendly fabrics to reduce waste and minimize the use of synthetics. Over 70% of our 2021 collections are composed of sustainable materials, but our long-term goal is to get as close as possible to 100%.

The main fibers we used this year:

• organic cotton
• recycled polyester
• recycled cashmere
• recycled nylon
• wool

We’re a proud signatory on the AAFA/FLA Apparel & Footwear Industry Commitment to Responsible Recruitment, a proactive industry effort to address potential forced labor risks for migrant workers in the global supply chain.

We’re also participants of the United Nations (UN) Global Compact, an initiative that works to implement universal principles regarding matters of human rights, labor, the environment, and corruption. As a leading authority on corporate sustainability, the UN Global Compact actively engages with businesses in cooperation with civil society and representatives of organized labor. Our application is pending, and we’re excited to become an official signatory soon.

When it comes to manufacturing, we work with factories that have these certifications:

• Organic Content Standard 100 (OCS 100)
• Responsible Wool Standard (RWS)
• Better Cotton Initiative  (BCI)
• Global Organic Textile Standards (GOTS)
• Forest Stewardship Council (FSC)
• Standard 100 by OEKO-TEK
• SA8000 Standard
• Bluesign Certification
• The HIGG Index

We started our environmental efforts where we knew we could make the most impact.

Since most of a product’s life-cycle impact is determined by its materials, we created our own guide, The Goods Mandate, to help us choose preferred materials as defined by the Textile Exchange. Think more organic and recycled, less synthetic and brand new.

Additionally, at least 70% of products from each of our brands must be made with materials that meet our Better and Best criteria.

We plan to remove virgin plastic and virgin polyester from our supply chain. And while our 70%-sustainable-materials mandate already surpasses the industry standard, we know we can do even better. Specifically, 10% better, every year.

Biggest obstacles: availability, cost, and quality of materials

Transparency and traceability are key factors in differentiating greenwashing from real sustainability efforts. We’ll expand our sustainability team to include experts on carbon and renewable energy and create product scorecards that provide comprehensive supply-chain info.

• 2022: Complete baseline footprint for carbon
• 2023: Complete baseline footprints for water & waste
• 2024: Set reduction targets for each

Biggest obstacles: notoriously difficult data to capture; imprecise or incomplete data due to the complex, high-touch nature of external supply-chain systems

One of fashion’s biggest issues is waste. The stats are staggering: one garbage truck of textiles is burned or dumped in a landfill every second, and less than 1% of clothing material is ever recycled.

We’re working with experts to continuously minimize our waste and pollution, and we’re committed to using materials that last. By 2022, we’ll have a take-back program in place, and a way to keep irreparable and non recyclable items out of landfills.

Biggest obstacles: limited resources and time