Our sourcing strategy

Although we can trust on this regular production cycle for many years, during the last audit in December 2022, overtime was mentioned as a bottleneck in our Turkish factory. Workers complained about stress and a disturbed holiday planning. We will follow up on this complaint and see how we can adjust the production planning to lower stress: our procurement manager will make an updated analysis of the workflows and will make a proposal on adjusted workflows and delivery times from order to delivery with insights of the QRM and lean system.

1.3 Supplier relations

We have a very small number of suppliers within our supply chain and most relationships take longer than five years. With all our suppliers, we have very regular contacts, by digital communication, but we also try to visit the factories on a regular basis. Our procurement manager visits the factory in Turkey every month. When it is allowed again, also our Asia partners will be visited again.

Long-term and constructive supplier relations will remain our philosophy, although we had to decide to stop working with one of our long-term Chinese suppliers – as explained before because of quality issues and no willingness to be transparent on social issues. FWF membership ensures that we always remain attentive on the quality of our supplier relations and on new insights in the social context of our producers. Recently, we made up a risk analysis at supplier level, which keeps us aware of the possible risks.