Lindex

Lindex makes continuous commitments to maintaining sustainable practices across their approximately 460 stores and their supply chains. Their commitment to sustainability includes a focus on women’s economic empowerment, environmentally-friendly practices and protection of human rights. Here we highlight how they’ve conducted Step 4: Track Implementation and Results.

Lindex strives for decent work conditions across their whole enterprise. This means guaranteeing a living wage, ensuring workplaces are safe and free from both harassment and discrimination. By focusing on this, Lindex ensures that they can remain dedicated to sustainable business practices and gender equality.

Impact assessment goals

Lindex’s impact assessment goals include (amongst others):

  • By 2020, ensuring that no discrimination and harassment occurs within Lindex’ own operations.
  • By 2021, all Lindex business partners have signed the Lindex Sustainability Commitment and are also dedicated to the new Code of Conduct with gender equality as a key pillar.
  • By 2022, all Lindex employees agree that Lindex acts in line with the company’s goal “to empower and inspire women everywhere”
  • By 2025, Lindex suppliers, who stand for 80 per cent of its production, show total supply chain transparency and commitment to improving working conditions, actively use a living wage programme and participate in Lindex’s Women Empowerment programme.

“Lindex tracks the implementation of their sustainable business practices across their whole enterprise, which ensures that the necessary changes are being made to fully dedicate to gender equality”

Achievements

Lindex has generally carried out factory audits, but has recently been investigating their effectiveness. They tracked the results of these audits and found they did not have many significant positive changes according to their goals. Lindex found that the suppliers did not know how to correctly report on gender-specific issues and so these issues were not being addressed. This tracking allowed for Lindex to start implementing a parallel training programme so that suppliers can more effectively do gender-specific self-assessments of their businesses and report any issues directly back to Lindex. By doing this, suppliers bear greater responsibility for addresses adverse impacts and therefore can better commit to the company-wide sustainability and gender equality policies. Lindex tracks the implementation of their sustainable business practices across their whole enterprise, which ensures that the necessary changes are being made to fully dedicate to gender equality.

The enterprise has made great progress along other steps of the GRDD process such as Step 3: Address adverse impacts and Step 5: Communicate how impacts are addressed. This is demonstrated in their support of the HERproject initiated by BSR. The HERproject has shown an increase in both quality and efficiency in factories as well as bettering relations between workers and management. Their commitment to total supply chain transparency whereby all of employees’ human rights are protected is another success that aligns with Step 5 of the GRDD process.

“Across our value chain, the wellbeing of women has been compromised – from poor labour conditions in manufacturing to unhealthy stereotypes and ideals in advertising…We have done a lot of good work which we will continue, but we also promise to step up in those areas where progress has been slow.”

– Lindex’s Empowering Women promise.

Application to other enterprises

Lindex successfully tracked where implementation was needed and where their results were unsatisfactory. By doing this through a gendered lens, they witnessed an increase in productivity and betterment of their worker’s livelihoods. Other enterprises could garner such success by learning from the multiple gender-responsive steps taken by Lindex.

This case study was written in collaboration with Plan International and Partnering for Social Impact.