Suppliers
Whether our products are made in Maine or across the globe, everyone who makes them plays an important part in helping us achieve exceptional quality and sustainability. And like any great community, we believe in treating every individual with the fairness and respect they deserve – while maintaining an environment that’s safe, healthy and well suited to support everyone’s wellbeing.
Working conditions that adhere to international standards are not just beneficial to our employees. Implementing well-researched data and industry-best practices into our manufacturing results in positive social, economic and psychological factors and increases our products’ lifecycle sustainability.
In other words, before we make our products, we make the right decisions to ensure more sustainable solutions, more environmentally-friendly facilities and happier, healthier employees.
Global Factory Monitoring
When you partner with dozens of factories around the world, it’s imperative to remember that every place is unique. Each factory and workforce may have different needs that are required to make sure employees are treated with the utmost fairness and the facilities they work in are the best they can be. That’s why we have an in-house monitoring team. They coordinate with third-party organizations and other brands to make sure that no matter where we do business, our standards for human rights and healthy working conditions are the same and put the worker first.
Our L.L.Bean Forced Labor Policy strictly prohibits the use of forced labor of any kind. Our global compliance programs and auditors cover every country where a factory makes L.L.Bean-branded product, including China, to ensure that code is upheld. Consequently, in August of 2020, L.L.Bean made the decision to exit Xinjiang and remove all Chinese cotton from our assortment. We have full confidence in our due diligence and supply chain mapping process, which maps down to the cotton bale level, to state that none of our products are made with Chinese cotton or use forced labor.
L.L.Bean is proud to continue our tradition of transparency by introducing the factories in our supply chain that make our high-quality private label products. This is a comprehensive list of every factory that produces a finished product proudly bearing the name L.L.Bean. Our quality is built on relationships, including those we have with our manufacturing partners. L.L.Bean employees have vetted each factory to ensure the highest standards for human rights, environmental impact and quality.
Fairness for All
You don’t become a 100+ year-old brand by losing sight of the people who helped you get there. We deeply value and respect all of our employees and partners, whether they’re right here in our backyard or across the sea. So, we’ve set in place strict responsible manufacturing practices and partnered with multiple organizations and industry groups (e.g. the United States Council for International business and the United Nations-affiliated Better Work program) so that anyone who works for us receives fair treatment and ideal working situations. It’s not only the smart thing to do, it’s the right thing to do.