This article is part of our ‘(Re)Made in Ghana’ series, which explores what one of the world’s largest circular fashion ecosystems — Kantamanto Market — can teach us about the future of fashion. Read our series on ‘Made in Italy’ here, ‘Made in India’ here, and ‘Made in the UK’ here.
As head of positive impact for British surf brand Finisterre, it takes a lot to stop Adele Gingell in her tracks. But a non-profit campaign calling for brands to disclose their production volumes did just that.
“I vividly remember, I was in our London store when our social media manager rang me to say we had been tagged in a post — not just once, but loads,” she recalls. “You assume it’s going to be fast fashion brands getting tagged, but we were tagged alongside lots of other values-driven brands. And it wasn’t the industry asking, it was our customers. I called our CEO immediately and we decided to go for it.”
Finisterre was one of the first brands to take the plunge and sign up to Speak Volumes, a campaign founded by Ghanaian American non-profit The Or Foundation in 2023, which asks brands to publicly display their production volumes and eventually commit to reducing them. It’s a seemingly simple demand, designed to tap into one of sustainable fashion’s most existential questions: can the industry meet its sustainability targets if it continues to grow?
“Volume is the missing piece that connects environmental impact, social harm, and consumer culture. It’s the fundamental question of our time,” says sustainability strategist Rachel Arthur, who authored a seminal report on fashion’s relationship to growth for global non-profit Textile Exchange back in 2024, alongside her ongoing work with the UN Environment Program. “To address overproduction and overconsumption, we need to know how much is being produced. Without that baseline, meaningful policy and accountability are just not possible.”
The lack of robust data on production volumes is “an embarrassing data gap” for fashion, says The Or Foundation co-founder and executive director Liz Ricketts. In the three years since Speak Volumes launched, The Or Foundation has directly asked 1,039 brands to sign up to the campaign and share their production volumes each year, but only 193 have done so, including Collina Strada, Ninety Percent and ELV Denim (others, like Swedish brand Asket, signed up but have not kept up their disclosures). The data gathered by The Or Foundation is shared on the Speak Volumes website. Brands are also asked to communicate their production volumes in their impact reports and on their social media channels. The long-term goal is to build enough data to form industry standards, so references to small, medium, or large businesses are defined partly by production volumes.
Without regulation mandating these disclosures, just 9% of fashion brands currently share their production volumes publicly, according to the latest What Fuels Fashion? report from advocacy organization Fashion Revolution. Between those 14 brands, total annual production topped 4.3 billion items per year, giving a tiny indication of just how big fashion’s footprint really is. Attempts to estimate the total figure vary wildly, from 80 billion to 200 billion garments per year. Some hesitations are around the lack of legal framework or requirements to disclose, and the public perception: Will small brands be judged too harshly, without the added context of how much big brands are producing? Will sharing production volumes come back to bite brands if the figures rise over time?
“The root of the waste crisis is overproduction,” says Ricketts. “We have no business producing this many garments, and yet we continue to dance around the topic. If we are serious about sustainability, that data gap should not exist.”
What does it take for a brand to Speak Volumes?
Getting brands on board is no small feat, says fair fashion campaigner and content creator Venetia La Manna, who worked with The Or Foundation to disseminate the campaign.
“Publicly visible social media pressure has been a very effective tool, but it’s been a much more time-consuming process than I imagined,” she explains. “This year, specifically, my community tagged brands they would like to come on board under my videos, which I then followed up with comments under the brands’ posts, alongside direct messages, emails, phone calls and in-person meetings.”
Among the brands who joined are Finisterre and underwear brand Stripe Stare. “We are a B Corp, so the campaign was very easy for us to take part in, because we already monitored our production and had the information at our fingertips,” says Stripe Stare founder Katie Lopes. Stripe Stare’s production volumes rose by a third, from 325,560 pieces in 2023 to 435,312 pieces in 2024. “The hardest job for our merchandising team is anticipating what growth is going to look like for the next year, and we don’t always get it right. Sometimes we overproduce, but we are really reactive when that happens so that stock is not left floundering. If anything, we are usually a little too cautious and don’t produce enough, but I would rather that way around.”
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.)
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.
The Or Foundation started Speak Volumes while lobbying for globally accountable extended producer responsibility (EPR) legislation, arguing that EPR fees should be eco-modulated based on production volumes. There are some signs that this could come to fruition. Under the newly codified EPR rules, brands will likely have to disclose their production volumes by unit to the private Producer Responsibility Organisation (PRO) that manages EPR fees and spending in their region, so that fees can be eco-modulated depending on the scale of a business and its perceived proximity to fast fashion. But this information will remain hidden from the public.
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Other regulations have skirted around the issue, too. France’s anti-fast fashion bill, for example, includes a definition of fast fashion versus ultra-fast fashion, which gives some indication of the product volumes at play, albeit not how many of each product is made. By the law’s definition, classic fast fashion companies release around a thousand new products per day, while ultra-fast fashion companies veer closer to 12,000. The bill poses higher penalties for ultra-fast fashion brands, signaling that size really does matter. Likewise, the EU’s Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive (CSRD) will require brands to disclose their production volumes by weight, which will be public, but doesn’t help consumers to contextualize production on the garment level.
But different regulations requesting different levels of disclosure and different metrics, is only adding to the confusion, says Ricketts. “The regulations are not speaking to one another. Data based on weights is not helpful to the consumer or to policymakers, unless they know the weight of a sock versus a jacket,” she says. “And tracking production by weight also risks erasing all the labor that goes into disassembly for recycling or upcycling, which takes a tremendous amount of work. We’ve heard from a lot of brands that they are open to sharing production volumes by unit, but they don’t want to report two different volume figures publicly, and policy requires them to disclose by weight.”
Still, she adds, there are signs of progress behind the scenes. “Even though they don’t disclose production volumes publicly, a lot of big brands are making decisions to prioritize lower volumes of higher quality products,” Ricketts says. “Some even have quite aggressive displacement targets [to replace new production with circular products]. That’s good news, and I think a lot of people would be pleasantly surprised by the commitments those brands are making internally.”
As ever with a topic as contentious as growth, there are broader tensions at play, adds Arthur. “From a policy standpoint, confronting volumes is met with resistance because it leads to uncomfortable conversations about limiting growth,” she says. This has become a particular focus in Europe over the past year, as politicians push to sharpen Europe’s competitive edge. “This is an industry that takes value from producing more. Anything that questions that challenges the entire system. We just can’t reach sustainability targets if we’re still in expansion mode.”
