At Best&Less we always value our relationships with suppliers and work very closely with them to ensure that we support each other. We build strong long-standing successful relationships with good consistent communication.
During the COVID-19 pandemic, it was more important than ever to over communicate with our overseas suppliers and we were able to openly discuss our options to ensure we all survived with the heightened level of uncertainty.
Our strategy in Bangladesh and India has never changed, working with only six suppliers in Bangladesh and four in India, has made it easy to communicate over this time.
We kept our stores open to sell essential winter products to our customers throughout the lockdown period even though traffic in stores was at an all-time low, we needed to support our customers, our teams and to honour our orders to suppliers.
All suppliers were contacted directly and we agreed to either accept delivery of garments already produced as well as goods in production or in some cases moved or pause orders to a later date to be able to honour our commitment. We only cancelled orders that hadn’t been started. Since that time we have also placed additional orders and removed the hold we had on the production of orders.
We spoke directly with all suppliers to ensure that they could pay their workers and worked through payment plans with them. Bangladesh and India has been in an extended period of lockdown as a consequence of the pandemic and we have constantly checked in with our factories to ensure that no additional pressure was placed on workforce expectations during the shutdown periods. We have adjusted our order fulfilment dates to accommodate the health and safety needs of the workforce employed to produce our orders.
Factories have now all re-opened and workers in Bangladesh and India are returning to work now as they ease back into a full production capacity. Our factories in China are already back to full production.
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