Stripe & Stare has been disclosing its production volumes for two years now. The fast-growing underwear brand produced 325,560 pieces in 2023 and 435,312 pieces in 2024.Photo: Annie Reid
Likewise, totting up Finisterre’s production volumes was a speedy process, says Gingell. “You can overcomplicate it, but it doesn’t need to be forensic accounting,” she says. “I simply pulled up our purchase orders from the previous year and added them up. It took two minutes.”
More recent signatories include British leather goods brand Mulberry, which published its production figures for the first time in its 2024/25 impact report, noting that it was “following in the footsteps of our fellow B Corps”. Head of sustainability Rosie Wollacott told Vogue Business that the company hopes other brands will join Mulberry, so the industry can “address issues surrounding the realities of textile waste, value, and responsibility in fashion”.
Per the report, Mulberry produced 191,795 units in 2024. “Using data from our planning team, we calculated the total units produced over the year, broken down by country of manufacture,” says Wollacott. “It is information we already track when measuring our global carbon footprint, so we didn’t need to create any new processes to share it.”
Larger brands with complex, global supply chains led by siloed teams might have a harder time gathering the data, but it’s not impossible, says Arthur. “The data exists, but it’s often siloed across suppliers, regions and systems, making aggregation challenging. Like much of the work in sustainability, it’s as much about political will as technical ability.” But it’s not impossible: brands including Adidas, Lululemon and Mango have all shared production volumes in the past. In 2022, for example, Adidas produced 419 million pairs of shoes and 482 million apparel items, while Lululemon produced 141 million units, and Mango produced 155 million. (None responded to requests for comment.)
Disclosing production volumes isn’t part of the B Corp certification process, but a growing contingent of brands signed up to Speak Volumes are B Corps, including Mulberry, Finisterre and Stripe & Stare.Photo: Finisterre
Could policy drive momentum?
One of the biggest barriers for brands to take part in the campaign is the lack of a level playing field, says Ricketts. If every brand had to disclose its production volumes, it would be easier for customers and policymakers to contextualise these figures, and the risks wouldn’t be as high. In theory, this is something regulation could solve, but policymakers have been reluctant to stage such an obvious market intervention. That might not always be the case.