Full Traceability
The modern garment supply chain is complex and conventional “Made In” labels offer a dangerously simplified truth. Instead, we trace every step of our garments’ creation, from farm to finish line, so that we at ASKET, and you as an individual, can make informed decisions about the clothing we choose to invest in.
0%
Overall product traceability
100%
Traceable
90%
Traceable
80%
Traceable
70%
Traceable
WHAT FULL TRACEABILITY MEANS
Full Traceability is our garment origin disclosure standard, requiring us to split out every component in a garment, identify every process in creating it and locate each facility at which a process occurs. A trim (e.g. sewing thread, button, fusing, tape, zipper) is broken down into its material extraction and the component production. A fabric (body fabrics and linings) is broken down into the yarns it's made up of and traced from farming or recycling, through spinning, dyeing, knitting or weaving to any finishing processes. The garment construction per se is broken down into cutting, sewing or linking, washing and packing. It is, by definition, full traceability - every step is accounted for. The only exemption to date is the dye stuff, chemicals and stones used in dyeing and washing processes. They're not physical components of the end-product, but we do hope to start tracing them eventually too.
We trace by traveling and visiting facilities across the world, issuing questionnaires and collecting certificates of origin.
- Trims facilities are currently not visited, but traced by paper trail and questionnaires.
- Raw Material facilities of main fibers currently can't be traced to single locations, but are considered traced when we have an exclusive list of the farms contributing to the garment batch (merino wool), by certificates of regional origin (GOTS organic cotton and Lenzing Tencell™ wood fibers) or by GRS certificates for recycled fibers (post- and pre-consumer wool, recycled PET and nylon), due to the technical hurdles in tracing recycled fibers to the specific PET bottles or old garments that they're made up of.
- Milling and Manufacturing facilities are always visited by our product team and you can explore them on our Factory Pages here as well as on every product page. No matter how far we’ve traced a garment, we provide everything we know - and everything we don’t - right here at asket.com and on the Full Traceability label sewn into every garment.
HOW THE SCORING WORKS
We group the traceability score of a garment's components by manufacturing tiers - Raw Material, Milling and Manufacturing. Minor components (sewing threads, buttons, zippers, fusing etc.), are bundled into a fourth tier - Trims.
A product's traceability score is the average traceability of all facilities involved in creating each of its components. A facility is fully traced when we know the facility's legal name and location, 2/3 traced if we know the city of the facility and 1/3 traced if we only know the country of the facility.
Raw Material, tier 3, is the extraction and preparation of fibres. It includes GOTS certified cotton and linen farming, ginning or retting, RWS certified merino sheep farming and shearing, as well as forestry for Tencell™ Lyocell production.
Milling, tier 2, is the creation of the main yarns and fabrics - both body fabrics and linings. Processes stretch from mechanical or chemical recycling, fiber combing, yarn spinning, twisting, dyeing and weaving or knitting all the way to the finished yarn or fabric roll.
Manufacturing, tier 1, includes all steps from finished yarns or fabrics to final garment: knitting (for fully fashioned knits), cutting, sewing or linking, washing, pressing and packing.
Trims, refer to the remaining components of a garment: Sewing thread, labels, hangtags, buttons and zips. Due to the difficulty in tracing trims, we look to identify the facilities involved in two simplified processes: material extraction and trim production.
