JW Anderson was established in 2008 by Jonathan Anderson. Headquartered in London, United Kingdom, the brand designs and sells dresses, tops, and bottoms. Their products are manufactured in UK, China, Portugal, and Spain.
In our pursuit of knowing how sustainable JW Anderson is, we researched their current practices and how much they are impacting the environment. Areas we explored include raw material use, brand communications, long-term use, energy efficiency, and waste generation.
The larger part of their collection is made of cotton, which is known to have very high water and energy requirements. Additionally, the brand also uses wool, polyester, acrylic, and viscose in manufacturing their clothes. This heavy use of polluting fabrics show that they have lower-than-the-average standards when it comes to sourcing of raw materials.
JW Anderson is coming up short when it comes to including sustainability in their customer communication efforts. This is reflected by the lack of effort in sharing information about their goals and initiatives concerning the industry’s impact on the environment. They also failed to incorporate, in their marketing campaigns, any message that could encourage the public to take action in improving their global impact. Moreover, the environmental life-cycle assessment results of their products were kept from their customers. Thus, depriving them with details that could help them make responsible purchasing decisions.
Efforts to help promote the long-term use of their products were not included in their retail strategy. Additionally, they also don’t coordinate garment collecting initiatives, which could help encourage their customers to improve their efforts in reducing their personal waste footprint.
Despite the major benefits of transitioning their operations to renewable energy, it seems that they haven’t adopted this technology yet. What’s more, they also don’t help reduce consumer impact during the use-phase of their products. This is shown by the absence of any eco-conscious care instructions from their labels that could guide their customers in caring for their clothes responsibly.
The environment suffers some adverse impact whenever a package is transported quickly. Unfortunately, it appears that they haven’t taken the most essential step of creating a greener shipping practice. This is made clear by the absence of standard shipping options for their online customers. On top of this, there are also no incentives offered to users who opt out of express shipping methods like overnight and same-day delivery.
JW Anderson packages their products free of any plastic material. Instead, they are using mainly paperÑa material that is biodegradable, reusable, and recyclable. To further minimize any waste that comes from their products, they use the appropriate size box and fewest possible components to pack their orders in.
After researching how sustainable JW Anderson is, we determined that, based on their computed score of 2.6 or a rating of Late Bloomer, they are hardly sustainable. This is a very low rating and indicates that they are performing poorly with repect to their environmental efforts.
