Marketplace

Our relationships with our customers and suppliers are at the heart of our business and we believe we can and should work together to build a sustainable business. The Group has a sustainable procurement programme, which identifies the core impacts that are important to us and which we believe we can influence through our supply chain. They are:

• Ethical trading – labour practices and working conditions in our own brand supply chain;
• Waste – generation and disposal of waste;
• Carbon emissions – created by the delivery of goods to our distribution centres and our shipments to customers; and
• Paper – used in the production of our product catalogues and marketing activity.

Highlights of our marketplace programme in 2008 include:

• Our International Purchasing team performing workplace social audits on eight of our most important own brand suppliers against our labour practices and working conditions standards;
• Successfully rolling out our sustainable procurement workshop programme from the UK into the US, training the businesses’ procurement teams to take elements of environmental and social impact into account when purchasing from suppliers; and
• Working with one of our third-party carriers to develop the monitoring of the environmental impacts of the deliveries they make of the Company’s products.