Fair Trade

Fair Trade @ The Little Feet Company

The products we source out here in Vietnam are manufactured to the very highest safety and design standards. We are striving to establish ourselves in a very competitive market place and grown our business whilst maintaining our standards.

Why The Little Feet Company is Fair Trade not Fairtrade?

The term Fairtrade is used to describe the certification and labelling system governed by FLO designed to allow consumers to identify goods produced under agreed labour and environmental standards. The term Fair Trade is used to refer to the Fair Trade movement as a whole and can be used to describe both labelled and unlabelled goods and the work of Alternative Trade Organizations (ATOs), Fair Trade federations and networks such as IFAT, NEWS, EFTA etc. The term fair trade is a broader term often used to describe one or many of the above, but can also occasionally be used to refer to trade justice issues. In such cases, it can be as broad as to describe general fairness in trade, such as tariffs, subsidies, worker rights and other issues.

What is the difference between Fairtrade and ethical trading?

Ethical trading means companies are involved in a process of trying to ensure that the basic labour rights of the employees of their third world suppliers from developing countries are respected. The Fairtrade Certification Mark, which applies to products rather than companies, aims to give disadvantaged small producers more control over their own lives. It addresses the injustice of low prices by guaranteeing that producers receive fair terms of trade and fair prices – however unfair the conventional market is. On top of the Fairtrade Minimum Price, the Fairtrade Labelling system guarantees a premium for producer organizations or workers bodies to enable them to invest in social, economical or environmental improvements.

....as far as The Little Feet Company  is concerned, our products cannot be officially fair trade certified because they are composite products made from a variety of fabrics sourced from across Vietnam. The end products are manufactured at a variety of location within Vietnam but because we don’t 'grow' the products ourselves and because the supply of our products come from a variety of location within Vietnam  the products are not yet eligible to be certified as they don’t fit into any existing category.

However we at the Little Feet Company successfully strive to meet the standards that have been outline by the fair trade federation for ethical partnerships with the artisans we work with in Vietnam, and we would comfortably say we are ethical traders.