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Late last month, I joined a two-day field trip to flax country. Alongside a small group of buyers, production teams and sustainability professionals, from both fashion and interior brands, I boarded the Eurostar in London and arrived in the French city of Lille less than 90 minutes later, where we were treated to a local cheese-smothered delicacy called a “Welsh”. The next morning, we woke up bright and early, and crossed the nearby border to Belgium to see the flax fields in bloom. The plants’ small, purplish-blue flowers only appear for a few hours before dropping to the ground. We rounded out the trip with a visit to a local mill and a weaving factory, before heading home in time for dinner.
Experiences like this are becoming increasingly common, as fashion regulators push for supply chain transparency and industry organisations seek to close the gap between brands and the people producing for them.
Regenerative leather advocate British Pasture Leather (BPL) runs four field days in the UK each year, while global non-profit Textile Exchange doubled down on taking brands to see Tier 4 suppliers in its recent “reprioritisation”. Brands are also getting in on the action: Portuguese menswear label Isto is making factory visits part of its transparency offer for customers, while French footwear brand Veja recently took a selection of press and industry peers (including Sojo founder Josephine Philips and footwear upcyclist Helen Kirkum) to see its wild rubber supply chain in the Amazon rainforest.
By paying a premium for wild rubber, Veja hopes to incentivise producers to keep the forest standing. But money alone doesn’t solve the problem.
In each case, the organisers cite a growing need to educate on production processes: if brand professionals and customers don’t understand how supply chains function, how can they see what impact their decisions have upstream, or contribute to improving them? On the flip side, how can brands better communicate their own efforts to improve the lives of producers without showing people firsthand — an experience that no amount of creative copywriting or video content can ever really capture.
Over the past year, I have visited almost 50 fashion suppliers while reporting our ‘Made in Italy’ and ‘Made in the UK’ series. Every single trip lamented the lack of technical understanding and supply chain experience in the brand-side professionals they deal with on a daily basis. They say the lack of experience among buyers in particular makes their jobs more challenging: when buyers don’t understand the on-the-ground impact of their demands or decisions, suppliers are more likely to be backed into a corner on lead times and cost, and their investments or innovations are less likely to be rewarded. This can stall progress on sustainability, as well as on souring the relationships that are foundational to making good fashion products.
The first time BPL offered a field trip to see its cattle farms — on a “washed-out” Friday in England in October 2023 — co-founder Sara Grady says many of the fashion set turned up in bright white trainers. “This has happened repeatedly, even when we send three separate emails warning people to wear appropriate footwear,” laughs Grady. “These are professionals who work in fashion and footwear brands, for whom leather is a really important material, but they are so disconnected from its origins. That was very symbolic to me.”
My jaunt to flax country was hosted by the Alliance for European Flax-Linen and Hemp, an early mover that has been offering immersive experiences to a rotating crop of fashion insiders eight times each summer for over a decade, in an effort to showcase local natural fibres and the people proudly growing and processing them. “We want people to fall in love with linen — to touch it, feel it, smell it and really understand it,” says Gill Gledhill, founder of communications and marketing consultancy GGHQ, who has coordinated the Alliance field trips since 2016. “Everything is open for people to explore.”
Done right, field trips and tours can help build trust with brand partners and consumers alike, and win wider support for sustainable practices, which are too often overlooked or dismissed as dry and difficult.
“Field trips are so important because they offer a practical opportunity to learn on the ground, providing an inside look into the production systems and innovations driving impact in the textile industry,” says Sarah Needham, senior director of engagement and partnerships at global non-profit Textile Exchange, which has been offering field trips alongside its annual conference since its inception. Both the Alliance and BPL have run field trips through Textile Exchange in the past.
“It’s an opportunity to develop a shared understanding between people who are often not easily connected in global fashion supply systems,” continues Needham. “Brands are able to experience challenges and successes at production-system level firsthand, while building empathy and an increased connection to that piece of the value chain. Meanwhile, producers can connect with what happens to their fibres and materials further upstream.”
It’s a delicate alchemy to get right. How do you create those intangible shifts in values and make people care about something they haven’t given much thought to? And how do you measure the impact or return on investment (ROI) of something so amorphous?
Bringing supply chain due diligence to life
Suppliers are often obscured by fashion’s complex and opaque supply chains, and are reduced to numbers on a spreadsheet by brand contacts with KPIs to hit. It’s rare for suppliers to be heard by their brand partners, or the consumers buying their products, let alone on home turf.
“I spend a lot of time working behind a computer screen in London. Although we engage with our suppliers directly, there’s a barrier there. To meet them face to face and learn from their expertise is really beneficial,” says Alex Barnett, ethics and sustainability manager at The White Company, who I met on the flax trip in June. “It makes the work feel so much more human-centred.”
Barnett recently came back from a trip to Inner Mongolia, where he visited the herders producing cashmere for The White Company during the cultivation period at the end of spring. He took a few of the brand’s cashmere products with him, to show the herders where their fibre ends up. Last week, Barnett presented his findings to colleagues back in London during one of The White Company’s internal ‘Field Notes On’ sessions. He will do the same after his upcoming trip to Türkiye to meet with cotton suppliers.
“We take thousands of photos and videos, which obviously can’t replace being there in-person, but hopefully people take the learnings into their day-to-day responsibilities,” he says.
So much of sustainability work is about compliance — an administrative burden that brands and suppliers bemoan. But field trips offer a rare and rewarding respite; a chance to see the nature and the human impact of sustainability work in action. This can be a much-needed motivator for sustainability teams, who are so often siloed, over-stretched or on the brink of burnout. But Barnett says the benefits of field trips can extend to other teams. “When we visited our cotton suppliers in Egypt last October, we took some of our commercial team with us. Seeing the people behind it really helped to humanise the process. They were able to experience the challenges on the other side of their commercial targets for themselves.”
Field trips are also an opportunity to see beyond the industry’s binary ways of thinking, says Gledhill. On the flax field trip, one attendee asked Bert Wolfcarius, CEO of linen growing and scutching company Vleesbedrijf Verhalle, whether his fibre was regenerative — a label brands are keen to assign as the next evolution beyond organic, but which has proven difficult to define. “Bert was able to ask: what do you mean by regenerative? He was able to show people — not just tell them — how flax is grown,” Gledhill explains. “They can see that there is no irrigation, just rainwater. They can see that flax is grown on rotation with other crops, with birds and insects buzzing around. They can see the drones that monitor the fields for any issues. There are no dumb questions on a field trip, it’s just a fantastic opportunity to learn.”
For innovators trying to tell more complex stories about sustainability, field trips can be an accessible in-road, adds Grady. Designed to be a “sensory experience”, the BPL field trip begins with a visit to one of the regenerative cattle farms in its network. Attendees walk around the farm, see the cattle and hear about regenerative practices directly from the farmer. Nikki Yoxall, technical director of grass-fed farming association Pasture for Life, which works with BPL, then digs a hole and invites attendees to “smell the soil” (this can be an indicator of soil health). Then, self-styled “regenerative vet” Claire Whittle goes hunting for dung beetles in cow manure, an exercise she calls “dung beetle safari”, intended to open conversations around biodiversity and climate resilience. Guests are treated to a locally sourced lunch, which uses every part of the animal per BPL’s “nose-to-tail” approach, and driven to its commercial studio in Northamptonshire to see how the hides are transformed into leather.
It’s in the informal, in-between spaces (including the 45-minute coach ride after lunch) that the learnings start to percolate, says BPL co-founder Alice Robinson. “We get asked a lot of questions about what happens to the hides and how the leather production landscape is changing. People want to know why it’s so hard to produce regenerative leather, and to do it all in the UK, why we don’t have more abattoirs and tanneries. It’s been really interesting to peel back those layers of localised material production. A lot of those conversations, people wouldn’t have imagined themselves having at the start of the day,” she says.
One facet of the trip that constantly surprises people on the brand side is what happens to the hides when they are turned into products, adds Grady. “It’s very standard practice to obscure the natural character of the material — to remove the grain and emboss a consistent grain that is sealed with resin or polyurethane,” she says. “We get a lot of wide eyes when we explain this; lots of people think the grain you see in stores is natural.”
Different visitors will gain different things out of a tour or a field trip, says Needham. That’s part of the beauty of it. “First-timers to a cotton farm might just want to see how cotton is grown, understand practices and get a sense of the agricultural environment. For those with experience visiting cotton farms, it might be an opportunity to see the differences between regions, farming practices and cultivation types. For producers, who are carrying the heaviest burden of transformation, it’s an opportunity to demonstrate their commitments and efforts to those who are setting the expectation level,” she explains.
Inviting customers in
It’s not just brand representatives getting in on the action — consumers are, too. For Gen Z especially, knowledge of what goes on behind the scenes of fashion production is something of a status symbol.
Isto was founded on four principles: independence, superb quality, transparent pricing and organic materials. The third pillar started out as a commitment to publishing its cost breakdowns (alongside supplier lists), but has evolved over the past few years into immersive supply chain trips, which the brand funds for 20 to 25 customers each year (although the waitlist often exceeds 200). Each trip follows the supply chain of a singular product. One built around a T-shirt included visits to a yarn supplier, jersey producer and garment manufacturer. “We had a bunch of information on our website about the composition, pricing and suppliers, but how could our customers trust that without seeing it for themselves?” says Isto co-founder Pedro Palha. Isto calls these trips “factourism” (a portmanteau of ‘factory’ and ‘tourism’).
In a similar vein, London-based upcyclist Christopher Raeburn (who also serves as global creative director of VF Corp-owned Napapijri) has been running open studio tours for customers and potential brand collaborators for over a decade. He says it has been a fundamental tool in converting customers to more sustainable consumption habits, and justifying the high price point associated with labour-intensive upcycled garments. “As an independent business, you have to think differently to larger brands with big marketing budgets,” he says. “When you see incredibly skilled craftspeople deconstructing something and remaking it, it’s an incredible driver.”
Initially, Raeburn ran the tours for free, but found that drop-out rates were lower when there was a nominal ticket charge of £5, which the brand now donates to charity. Occasionally, he also runs custom, private tours for potential commercial partners, or individuals interested in bespoke designs. He’s currently mulling a new offering: guerilla tours of the new Victoria Albert museum off-shoot V&A East, which houses several designs from Raeburn’s debut collection.
How do you measure the impact of a field trip?
Far from a polished Instagram-ready brand experience, Isto’s transparency trips are designed to be real, says Palha, to build trust with customers and break down barriers between those at the top and bottom of fashion supply chains. “One year, we couldn’t find chauffeured coaches for everyone, so we just hired some minivans and drove them around ourselves,” he recalls.
But this off-the-cuff approach is reaching its limits, he says. “We’re in the process of professionalising the trips and developing KPIs for them,” continues Palha. “The ultimate signs of success for us are more people around the world believing in our brand, and customers trusting us more.”
For small operations like BPL and Scotland’s Lunan Bay Farm — which runs private tours to promote the regenerative benefits of rearing cashmere goats in the UK, as well as immersive experiences such as a “goat therapy retreat” — field trips could offer an additional revenue stream and a way to win over potential brand partners. BPL charges £200 a pop for standard field trip tickets, and even more for its bespoke or private group offerings, which can be booked by brands or boards, like Textile Exchange did recently.
A few hours after I spoke to Grady and Robinson, they were meeting with the wider team of a brand representative that came on their most recent field trip to discuss a potential commercial partnership. Beyond that, the feedback they receive is mostly anecdotal. “It’s hard to gather quantitative feedback,” says Grady. “But we do post-field trip surveys, which have thrown up some very detailed qualitative responses.”
Measuring the success of something so intangible is no easy feat, but the collective impact of more supply chain tours and immersive experiences could be enormous, says Needham. “We want stakeholders to walk away with empathy, a deeper understanding of each other’s challenges, and a shared appreciation for the work happening at every stage of the supply system. These real-world connections are essential for driving long-term progress. They motivate everyone involved to keep pushing for better practices, and to scale solutions in a way that’s grounded in collaboration, not just compliance.”
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