This July, Fashion Revolution launched the seventh edition of their Fashion Transparency Index: An annual ranking of 250 major brands based on what they publicly disclose about their social and environmental impacts.
The Fashion Transparency Index 2022 report can be read online and features a detailed analysis of the results, key transparency trends, and case studies.
The full Index, including all the underlying data, sources, and scores, is now available on the WikiRate open data platform.
Below we answer some questions about why Fashion Revolution makes the Index available as open data and who can benefit from this resource.
Why make the Fashion Transparency Index available as open data on WikiRate?
In recent months the issue of greenwashing has come to the fore with criticism of brands using tools such as the Higg Index to rate the sustainability of their products. Unfortunately, most sustainability rating systems take a ‘black box’ approach to their ratings — meaning that the methodology and underlying data is not publicly accessible.
This lack of transparency limits our ability to interrogate the sustainability claims that brands are attaching to their products, an issue that has recently got H&M into hot water with the Norwegian Consumer Authority.
Although the Fashion Transparency Index does not rate brands on their sustainability, it does provide a blueprint to understand how much information companies are disclosing and provides data to hold them accountable for their promises.
Fashion Revolution are keenly aware of the value of transparency — not only by the brands, but also by the systems that rate them. That is why they make the Index, methodology, and its underlying data available for everyone to access.
Who else can benefit from the Index being made available as open data?
On its own, the Index helps us understand where brands are at when it comes to transparency and incentivizes greater transparency as brands try to improve their scores year-on-year.
But that’s not all! The raw dataset is also a valuable resource containing over 60,000 data points about 250 brands. Once the Index is available as open data on WikiRate, it can be combined with data from other organisations and used to power their advocacy work.
What is an example of the Fashion Transparency Index data on WikiRate being used in another organization’s advocacy work?
Data from the Index on supply chain transparency and living wages is used in the Fashion Checker — a campaigning tool created by Clean Clothes Campaign and powered by the WikiRate platform.
The Fashion Checker connects the dots between brand commitments on living wages and aggregate wage data collected through surveys of facility workers. Fashion Checker data is used by organizations for urgent appeals and worker groups in their advocacy for better working conditions in facilities around the world.
The brand profiles you see on the Fashion Checker are generated from a combination of Clean Clothes Campaign and Fashion Transparency Index data stored on WikiRate. A more in-depth look at how these two organisations used this pioneering approach to scale their impact can be found here.
What’s next for the Fashion Transparency Index on WikiRate?
An update to the Fashion Checker will be released later this year, bringing in data from this year’s Index and a new set of facility wage data from worker interviews. We will also be launching a new tool called the Facility Checker which will allow users to ‘reverse search’ and find living wage data by searching for a facility rather than a brand.
We are working with Fashion Revolution to bring their country-specific Fashion Transparency Indexes onto WikiRate as open data. The Brazil Index was launched earlier this year, and the Mexican Index will be made available in August.
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