To create ethically
The FRE Rating System
We wanted our website to fully reflect our commitment, yet we were not happy with the labels of "fair trade" as far as jewelry was concerned. My research as author of www.fairjewelry.org led me to find that several companies were using "fair" and "eco" labels without exactly saying what that means.. One could even ask the question, as if have, Is There Such A Thing As Fair Trade Jewelry?
Our redesigned website emphasizes what we consider a best practice at this point: transparency linked to product. All the efforts so far around fair trade and ethical sourcing have focused primarily on three principles which we called Fair, Responsible, and Ecological (FRE).
- Fair: Includes labor that goes into the making of the piece. Labor includes all elements from the mine to the
manufacturing.
- Responsible: Concerns outreach to community, support of diversity and being a good example of a corporate citizen.
- Ecological: The environmental impact of the various components of the piece of jewelry, from mine to manufacturing
to the jewelry office and showroom.
Categorizing according to FRE makes our strengths and weak sourcing links public. It is a snapshot of a jewelry company's process of attempting to develop ethical sourcing without the supply chain to fully actualize the vision.
The current ratings are first pass at categorizing every piece of jewelry we make. Even as we launch the site we are digging deeper and improve the level of transparency in the system.
We also offer our FRE program as an open source approach which we hope will be adopted by other companies. It also is adaptable enough to eventually allow us to rate all of our approximately 3000 inventory pieces from which we produce about 8634 pieces of finished jewelry a year, the vast majority of which is manufactured in our Santa Fe, NM studio.
What we show at the time of this writing, October, 2007, is just the beginning. We welcome your feedback and involvement in this process. We also offer our "open source" FRE system to any jewelry company that wishes to use it. We only ask that you $contact_window first for permission.
FRE is a trade marked rating system for jewelry manufacturers developed by Reflective Images. However, it is an open source system and you are welcome to use it with permission free of any cost. If a jewelry company wishes to use FRE, $contact_window for permission.
Additional Resources:
- A System For Transparency.
- Easing into
green
- Why "blood diamonds" and "dirty gold" is good for the jewelry industry is explained in this article entitled,
"Turning
Bullets Into Gold".
- Sharee Coffee, marketing director for a large jewelry buying group, discusses the
ethical jewelry issues.
- How does a jeweler market their product to the
ethically concerned consumer?
- An interview with the fair trade liaison from the Rapaport Group, a major player in the movement to create
ethically sourced jewelry.
- How to separate spin from truth when purchasing "ethical" jewelry.
- Easing into green
Our special thanks to Adam Schultz and Garrett French at Bold Interactive for their assistance in helping us develop the FRE project.