Community & Environment

Kia ora! The Flo family believe businesses have a responsibility to look after our people and our planet as well as making a profit. We’re on a journey to keep learning how we can better support communities and reduce our impact on the environment, and we’d love to share this with you. We understand there are some huge issues facing the world right now, and that we all need to make some changes. As an industry, fashion and clothing is a major contributor to these major problems, and we want to help change that. 

 

Knowing that actions speak louder than words, below are some of the practices we’re actively engaging in to do so. We know we have lots of room for improvement, and are striving to make positive changes everyday.

The power of working collectively

Being a retailer that stocks over 100 brands, a lot of our footprint is down to each suppliers commitment to the planet and people - so we are well aware we’re in a position to help influence these brands in a positive way. We pledge to continue doing this as we have done so far, and we're motivated now more than ever to see our brands improving their practices in all three pillars of sustainability.

We are acutely aware of how our feedback towards brands and their sustainability practices are extremely important. Our team are using the values set out in our Ethical Edit, to encourage and support our brands to work towards using more ethical and sustainable practices (if they aren’t already). From the raw materials, to the processes, to their final product and their packaging, we have communicated and suggested specific ethical and sustainable alternatives, to give them a chance to incorporate these into their businesses.

Our influence varies across the different brands, for many smaller NZ brands, we may be their biggest retailer, giving us a lot more impact with the feedback we give them. Whereas for many, we are just a small one of their hundreds of Australasian stockists, buying a much smaller amount compared to bigger, international retailers, giving us much less power and influence. 

 

Community

We’ve built this pillar with the belief that everyone is worthy of love and that together the POWER OF KINDNESS can make a whole lot of difference in this world. Check out the work we've done to support the local and international organisations here.

Share & Care Nepal / Tearfund New Zealand

 

Flo Family in Nepal in 2018, visiting Share & Care's work.

 

Beautiful Nepalese women standing together in Flo Gives Back scarves.

 

 

Environment

Trees For the Future

We are aware of our increasing carbon footprint with online orders, so have  a way to somewhat contribute to offsetting this, by working with Trees For the Future, planting a tree for every online order placed.

CarbonClick 

We've teamed up with CarbonClick, a kiwi company making it easy for people and businesses to help fight climate change. CarbonClick looks like a green button at the checkout. When a customer clicks, it adds a $3 contribution to their transaction, to purchase carbon offsets. CarbonClick funds forest restoration, tree planting, and renewable energy projects in NZ and around the world. We hope you'll join us by choosing CarbonClick with your purchase.

Calculating our operational carbon footprint

We're committed to measuring an estimate of our operational carbon footprint, so have begun to do start measuring this using the Toitū Envirocare 'carbon assess' SME tool as of March 2022. Doing so will allow us to see where our largest emissions come from, so we can target and address them and even start to offset some of it.

Product sourcing

Selling clothes that are higher quality and long lasting (made to be loved and kept), we believe in fashion beautiful pieces that can be worn over and over again, mended, revived and loved.

Packaging

We use compostable shipping bags that are derived from biopolymers and co-polymer; PBAT , Corn-starch and PLA . Reuse this bag yourself, or If you have no further use for the bag, remove or cut off any labels/stickers still attached and place the bag itself into your compost bin. If you do not have a home compost, this app lets you  share another person’s compost: Sharewaste. 

Repairing / Adjusting Garments

We’re acutely aware of how big of a polluter the fashion industry is, and that often when people are giving away their old clothes to op shops, that a huge portion (approx 84%) of these clothes inevitably end up in landfill (Newsweek, 2016), without a second life. When our garments are not sold in stores or are deemed ‘unsellable’, we repair or change the garment as best as we can, to avoid this ending up in landfill. We encourage you to send us your old pieces so we can mend them and pass them on to great organisations like Koha Apparel, Women's Refuge or Dress for Success.

Head Office & Resource Use

We are constantly trying to come up with ways to reduce our waste at our office, by making simple swaps from single use plastic, for their eco friendly alternative. We’re not 100% there, but we’re all trying to learn and do our best. 

We Are On A Journey

We call this a journey, because we know there is always more improvements we can make to become more sustainable, and we feel every little step, no matter how big or small, is important. We recognise we are far from perfect, however, believe that any progress is better than no progress, and are excited to keep aiming to improve our triple bottom line of sustainability.

If you have any questions, suggestions or feedback for us, please feel free to flick us an email. We would so love to hear from you and get in touch with companies that can help us tread a little lighter on this wonderful world of ours.

If you’d like to know more about us, please have a nosy here 'Our Story'.