Responding To Blacklist Factory Events, Amazon Announced Its Own Brand Supplier List.

In October this year, Amazon, an American business giant, was reported to be selling products from the "blacklist" factory on its platform. In November 15th, Amazon first announced the list of its own brand manufacturers. Some non-governmental organizations (NGO) say this is commendable, but the public information is not detailed enough.

In October 23rd, the Wall Street journal published an article saying that Amazon was selling clothes produced by the "blacklist" factory. This is a textile product from third party retailers. It is said that its production plant is located in Bangladesh. It was blacklisted because of a collapse of a large factory in 2013. The accident resulted in more than 1000 deaths and major international brands promised to remove these factories from their supply chain.

Although the Wall Street Journal said that the products provided by Amazon's own brands were not linked to those blacklisted factories, 1/3 of Amazon's own brands were in textile category, and John Boumphrey, President of Amazon Fashion Europe, said in a media interview in October 24th that he could not disclose any details about the production of Amazon fashion products, so the "blacklist" factory incident still had a great impact on Amazon.

Now Amazon has finally taken action to promise that it will remove the products produced by the blacklist factory once it is discovered. It also provides transparent information of supply chain.

In the list of manufacturers of self owned brands, Amazon lists the names, addresses, countries and regions of its suppliers in detail. The supplier category covers several departments of Amazon.

The list includes 505 mainland suppliers, 29 Taiwan suppliers, 168 India suppliers, 23 Bangladesh suppliers, 6 Pakistan suppliers, 5 Vietnamese suppliers, 31 Japanese suppliers, 29 Sri Lankan suppliers, 19 Indonesia suppliers, 14 Thailand suppliers, 13 Malaysia suppliers, Philippines suppliers, South Korean suppliers, Kampuchea suppliers and Madagascar suppliers.

In addition, there are 102 American manufacturers and 12 Mexico manufacturers. In Europe, there are 10 suppliers in the United Kingdom, 9 in Poland, 4 in Italy, and 11 in Turkey. There are two foreign Paper Co in France.

After the publication of the list, Aruna Kashyap, a non-governmental organization's Human Rights Watch senior women's rights adviser, commented in November 20th: "the world's largest online retailer Amazon has sent a clear message that transparency is crucial and will continue to maintain and develop transparency. Those who do not disclose their supply chain brands may not know where their products are produced, which increases their suspicion of irresponsibility and increases the difficulty of safeguarding rights and interests for workers in areas where information is not readily available.

However, Human Rights Watch also made a series of criticisms about the list of Amazon released. The first problem is that there is no specific reference to the business areas of each manufacturer (such as textiles, cosmetics, electronics, etc.); two, although the list can be found on the Amazon website, it is somewhat concealed, and Amazon has not issued any formal statement or press release at the same time.

In fact, this list is not to be underestimated, because Amazon is already a brand factory to a certain extent. In just 5 years, it has launched more than 100 private brands in fashion only, which poses a threat to other fashion retail brands. And Amazon has been keeping a low profile on its fashion retailing strategy, making it even more disturbing outside.

Many large global fashion enterprises are pushing forward the process of "supply chain transparency". American apparel retailers GAP, British fashion and grocery retailer Marks & Spencer, Sweden fast fashion brand H&M, sports giant Nike, cowboy old Levi s, German sports giant Adidas have announced the list of suppliers. In the past two years, Japan's Xun marketing group has released its list of main manufacturers of its brand UNIQLO and GU. Besides the cooperating garment factories, it also extends its scope to two level suppliers' fabric factories.