Who Made Your Hat?

As a pioneer in ethical fashion, Pachacuti continues to push traceability and transparency standards higher in order to guarantee the highest social and environmental conditions throughout the supply chain.

Pachacuti’s women’s association who make our Fair Trade Panama hats were recently a pilot in the 3-year EU GEO Fair Trade project which created visible accountability of sustainable provenance and brought an unprecedented level of traceability and transparency to the fashion supply chain.

The project involved the creation and collection of social, economic and environmental indicators based on geographic data. This will enable the end consumer to scan a QR code to see the direct implications of their purchase on the livelihood of our weavers.

Collecting the GPS co-ordinates of each weaver was extremely time-consuming: they live in a remote area of the Ecuadorian Andes and only 45% of their houses were accessible by road.  However, this level of traceability is essential if shoppers want to see how their purchase supports the sustainable development of communities.

Pachacuti’s weavers are delighted that this helps correct a historical misnomer as  consumers can now track Panama hats back to the GPS location of individual weavers in their country of origin, Ecuador!