Kate Hall: Ensuring the brands you buy are sustainable and ethical

It can be hard these days to know if you’re buying from ethical sources, with drop shipping, exploitation, and cheap labour all common in the business world.  

Kate Hall has cultivated a list of questions to ask brands before you give them your hard earned dollar, and, if you don’t have time to do it yourself, her Ethical Directory is filled with brands she’s already vetted. 

Questions 

Where are all your products/materials sourced from and how are they produced? 
(details of each material type if there are multiple)? - E.g. countries, certifications, including swing tags, packaging etc.  

Where do your products end up at the end of their life?  
How can they be recycled and kept in the resource loop?  

How are your products shipped to customers?  
e.g. packaging and carbon neutral shipping.  

What is the NZ shipping cost  
& where in the world do you ship?  

Who makes your products?  
(as specific as possible please)  

How do you ensure  
the people who make your products are paid a fair wage?  

Aside from the people who make your products,  
Tell me about your team culture and how your head office/staff are treated. E.g. living wages, bonuses, staff wellbeing.  

What do you do with  
returns/samples/unsellable items?  

How do you foster diversity and equity in your business?  
practical examples please. e.g. diversity of models/staff etc. 

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:07):
You're listening to the Saturday Morning with Jack Team podcast
from News Talks that Be.

Speaker 2 (00:12):
A sustainability commentator. Kate Hall aka Ethically Kate. Who's with
us this morning?

Speaker 3 (00:17):
Kilder? Well did that's good?

Speaker 2 (00:20):
Very good? Thank you? This morning you were with us
with some really simple practical tips on how to ask
brands about the ethical and sustainable practices. Why does this matter?

Speaker 4 (00:31):
Well, I think as consumers we get very passive and
we think, you know, brand's not going to reply to us,
or you know, what does my kind of opinion matter?
And can you know what? Can I ask brands about
the supply chains and things like that? And it's important
that we do ask and realize actually we can be
active consumers and active in our purchasing decisions. And we

(00:53):
need to be because we need to make sure that
the people who are making our products are paid fairly.
That knowing what things are made with, so we can
care for them, you know, as best as we can. Yeah,
it's important that we become far more active in our
consumption rather than just mindlessly grabbing it and not thinking
about its whole life cycle or.

Speaker 3 (01:12):
Who made it.

Speaker 1 (01:12):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (01:13):
Nice, Okay, So you've got some simple questions where you
can go and ask a brand or ask someone a
representative of the brand what they've done. And you've kind
of crafted these over the last few years. So what
would be your advice to listeners when they're when they're
asking these questions of brands, if they want to know
about a brand's kind of sustainability creeds.

Speaker 3 (01:31):
Yeah.

Speaker 4 (01:32):
So I've worked on this list for probably actually the
last nine years, and I've tried. Obviously, I have the
privilege of this being my job and being able to
ask all these questions to brands, and I've crafted the
questions in a way that gets the best out of
the brand, because you know, you can get some pretty
some pretty no basic and poor and kind of tokenistic answers.

Speaker 5 (01:56):
Yeah, there is, there is, and I look for, like,
I have this list of questions which we can go through,
but I I always look for I'm not looking for
particular answers.

Speaker 4 (02:08):
There's no kind of It's not like a homework test
and you can quiz and like technical, you got that
one right, you know, sustainable, sustainability and ethics all very
there's it's not black and white. So I look for
transparency and honesty. You know, if a brand, one of
the first questions they ask is where your all your
products and materials source from and how they produced? And

(02:32):
if a brand goes, we source all of our fabrics
one hundred percent sustainably from you know, that is a
red flag. That is, you know, sustainably according to what metric?
You know, sustainably. It's every single brand, you know, even
all the amazing sustainable brands I work with. Everyone has

(02:52):
something they need to work on. So I look for
transparency and a brand being able to say, hey, yep,
they you know, here's some information, and as much information
as possible is really great, but you know, we're not
doing these things.

Speaker 3 (03:04):
Right yet and we're working on this.

Speaker 4 (03:06):
Yeah, And that's when I'd be way more likely to
purchase from them, you know, and to support them.

Speaker 1 (03:11):
Yeah.

Speaker 3 (03:12):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (03:12):
You want a brand that has enough kind of honesty.
I suppose that they can acknowledge that they're they're imperfect, right.
Any any brand that immediately says it's absolutely nailing it
is there's something a bit fishy the Yeah. So let's
talk through some of these questions. First of all, where
are all your products and materials sourced from? And how
are they produced? That's a big one, right.

Speaker 3 (03:34):
Yes, I mean that's huge.

Speaker 4 (03:35):
That's usually the one that, Yeah, especially when I'm vetting
brands to put them on my eth hole directory, it's
usually the longest list because you know, there may be
you know, even a T shirt may have where the
threads from?

Speaker 3 (03:49):
Where's the fabric from? Where the tag?

Speaker 2 (03:50):
You know?

Speaker 3 (03:51):
What about the swing tags? How? Yeah, the packaging materials.

Speaker 4 (03:55):
So that's that's a big one because a lot of
the products we buy a mixed materials or a lot
of the stores that we're asking this question of have
multiple different products made from different things. But that's a yeah,
important to ask. And you know that the brand should
know their supply chains and you know where they were made.

Speaker 2 (04:12):
You should ask where do your product end up at
the end of their life?

Speaker 4 (04:17):
Yes, yep, so like how can they be recycled and
kept in our resource loops so that they're not just
used for a short amount of time and then end
up in a hole in the ground.

Speaker 2 (04:26):
How are you how are your products shipped to customers?
And what's the New Zealand shipping cost? Why do you
ask both of those?

Speaker 3 (04:32):
Yes?

Speaker 4 (04:33):
I often ask that because some brands that's a that's
a key one for me because some brands they're like
way overseas and potentially the shipping may cost just as
much as the product or if it's not available. I mean,
I'm asking that one too because I'm wanting to be
able to recommend it to people as a sustainable blogger.

(04:55):
So I always ask that around the shipping costs because
you can get hit with yeah, extra fees and that
type of thing, which isn't sustainable if you can find
something else that is hearing you Zealand and not not
shipped around the globe and a lot of companies who
have a carbon neutral shipping and they're actually factoring that
into their kind of you know, yeah, that how they

(05:17):
do things in their business.

Speaker 2 (05:18):
Yeah, right, you should ask who makes your products and
how do you ensure they're pay to fee awake.

Speaker 4 (05:23):
Yes, that's one of my favorite ones. I mean that's
how ethically Kate and my whole work started was with
this question pretty much.

Speaker 3 (05:29):
Really, Yeah, who makes them?

Speaker 4 (05:31):
And yeah, do they work in a place where they
get lunch breaks and you know, overpay, if extra pay,
if they work over time and things like that.

Speaker 2 (05:41):
Yeah, here's one that I might stumble people or cause
people to stumble. Suppose, aside from the people who make
your products, tell me about your team culture.

Speaker 3 (05:52):
Yeah, and that's a bit of a wild card.

Speaker 4 (05:54):
It's not you know, the classic who made your products.
But I think with sustainability, it's there's a big breadth
to it. So if you're looking at a company and
they may be like, yeah, we make our products sustainably.
In India, they have like far beyond the living wage
and it's awesome, but they may have people here in

(06:16):
New Zealand just working their butts off and earning minimum wage,
or they're kind of not thinking about the diversity of
their models for their products or things like that. That
is sustainability to It goes right down to the head office.
And I find it really hard actually because a lot
of the sustainable brands are run by one person who

(06:37):
doesn't pay themselves a wage. You know they're really trying,
and you know there is a time and place for
that when you're starting. But I think this actually gets
a lot of small brands thinking because they're like, oh, shoot,
if I need to continue doing the sustainable business, I
actually need to make sure I'm paying my own rent
to in my own costs as well. So that gets

(06:58):
that becomes a really cool conversation that often these companies
aren't asked.

Speaker 2 (07:02):
So where are you asking them?

Speaker 3 (07:03):
So?

Speaker 2 (07:03):
Are you emailing them? Are you seeing them person Like
in a retail shop, you're just going up to someone
who's working there and saying, hey, can I have a
couple of minutes?

Speaker 4 (07:12):
Yeah, in a retail shop, I've learned that doesn't work
because usually the retail person is yeah, they're just there.
They'd actually don't know much about the company or the
clothes or have you made which I.

Speaker 3 (07:23):
Would like to see changed? But that's another point.

Speaker 4 (07:26):
So usually via email of these questions, you can actually
even message them on Instagram or Facebook, you know, as
a customer, that's something that brand's like responding to those
questions is in their best interest. They want you to
make a purchase. They you know, and you deserve to
know where your clothes were made, where your product, you know,
any type of product that you're buying, yeah, where it

(07:49):
came from. And we we all need to be far
more aware of that so that we can actually vote
with our pocket and buy things that are from ethically
made spaces.

Speaker 2 (07:57):
Yeah, I know too, that you've got that directory, which
is really helpful, so people can go and say that
you've done the hard work by collating all of this
a lot of things, well yeah, yeah yeah, but we'll
make sure we put those questions up online as well.
Thank you so much, Kate, and we will catch you
again very soon. That is Kate Hall aka ethically Kate.
You can find her on all of the social media

(08:19):
platforms by searching ethically Kate.

Speaker 1 (08:22):
For more from Saturday Morning with Jack Tame, listen live
to News Talks ed B from nine am Saturday, or
follow the podcast on iHeartRadio