Responsible Purchasing Practices: A Key to Reducing Sourcing Risks
How brands can support suppliers to improve resilience and mitigate social and environmental risks
3 July 2026
Associate Director
UK
Holly Browne
Holly draws on over a decade in fashion and sustainability, guiding ethical compliance and strategy development for brands seeking responsible production and sourcing.
Sourcing risks can arise out of a myriad of factors: geopolitics, regulatory changes, economic policy, and brand priorities. These risks can be hard to anticipate and are often the result of external pressures. However, companies – particularly in retail and apparel sectors – often miss one factor over which they have disproportionate power: purchasing practices.
Purchasing practices govern price, contractual terms, payment, and lead times. Implicitly, they set the course for how brands approach their supplier relationships.
Unfavourable purchasing can create internal problems for suppliers, like high costs and excess stock, and can impact their financial health, ability to manage social and environmental risks, and business resilience. This is why there is an explicit focus on responsible purchasing practices in global frameworks like the OECD Guidelines for Responsible Business Conduct, as well as in regulations such as the European Union’s Corporate Sustainability Due Diligence Directive (CSDDD). The European Commission published its EU Forced Labour Regulation guidelines in June 2026, which explicitly call out purchasing practices as a lever companies can pull to prevent, end or mitigate forced labour risk.
Brands with robust environmental and social compliance programmes may have strong audit cycles and corrective action processes, but checklists and questionnaires rarely leave room for suppliers to input on their experiences with brands and how their customers’ commercial decisions impact their own ability to meet ESG requirements.
At Anthesis, we address responsible purchasing in our on-site engagement with suppliers, which often reveals deeper challenges to how brands plan and execute sourcing plans.
On-site insights
How purchasing decisions affect social and environmental performance
In recent supplier engagement work conducted as part of a human rights impact assessment in Morocco, Anthesis engaged with supplier and site managers, as well as permanent and temporary workers from the factory floor.
A majority of suppliers brought up brand purchasing practices as a potential obstacle to improving their sustainability performance. For example, one supplier noted that they could not invest in critical long-term facility improvements, like air conditioning and ventilation to mitigate heat stress, without having visibility over order volumes for the rest of the year. Another supplier highlighted how more collaborative forecasting and better lead times could help increase visibility over workforce needs, reducing reliance on informal and temporary work and allowing the supplier to offer permanent contracts and benefits to a larger group of workers.
What supplier engagement reveals about purchasing practices
Supplier scorecards can also show these challenges, if we care to look at them with a critical eye. Suppliers are invariably ranked on issues such as quality, deliveries, lead times, communications, flexibility, and financial indicators, but also on sustainability topics such as control of chemicals, emissions reporting, and social audit scores.
These topics are all deeply interconnected; a supplier could find themselves negatively and positively rated for different issues due to the same underlying factors. For example, good performance in meeting tight brand deadlines may not only correlate with but also be enabled by poor working conditions and excessive working hours.
Our Supplier Engagement team works directly with clients to ensure that sustainability and compliance expectations are balanced with the realities suppliers face.
This perspective is critical: shifting purchasing practices is not just about changing policies or metrics – it also requires rethinking how brands engage with suppliers and how they ensure the messaging suppliers receive on brand priorities, expectations, and requirements is consistent. Getting the tone right and the wording precise is essential to drive meaningful action, build trust, and bring suppliers on the journey, rather than creating additional pressure or disengagement.
Nicola Thornley, Associate Director
Practical steps for more responsible purchasing
With purchasing practices squarely in the hands of brands, responsible purchasing can be an effective means for companies to mitigate a portion of their sourcing risks. Because of this, leading brands and sector initiatives are taking action, embedding responsible purchasing practices in their supplier partnerships through fair costing models and improved planning processes, with case studies showing how these directly improve supplier resilience and worker outcomes.
These outcomes in turn help the brands, giving them the ability to unlock further wins in their supply chains, cascading messages down to tier 2, 3 and 4 suppliers, and providing the financial stability needed for suppliers to make lasting improvements on social and environmental issues.
When built correctly, purchasing practices have the power to:
Improve supplier relationships and communications, allowing supplier feedback to reach buyers openly and productively
Support good practices in the supply chain, including living wages and the journey to Net Zero
Achieve compliance with mandatory regulations, including CSDDD, which explicitly call out purchasing practices as a lever for human rights and environmental risk mitigation
How Anthesis can help
To build better purchasing practices, companies first need to understand how their current ones impact the supply chain.
We engage suppliers through targeted questionnaires and interviews, gathering anonymous insights on how buyer relationships impact their operations, worker wellbeing and retention, and progress towards ESG goals.
Our services include:
Questionnaire Design: Creating digestible questionnaires for suppliers tackling the key RPP challenges
Supplier Outreach & Feedback: Coordinating outreach to suppliers and directly managing the data collection cycle
In-Depth Supplier Engagement: Conducting in-depth interviews with suppliers, on-site or virtually, to gather detailed feedback
Strategic Guidance: Translating supplier feedback and grievances into strategic insights for decision-makers
Stakeholder Coordination: Acting as a bridge between sourcing and ethical trade teams to kickstart change
Ultimately, the key is to ensure purchasing practices align with other ethical and sustainability-driven initiatives. Brands are often already working hard to do the right thing in their supply chains, from codes of conduct and ethical trade programmes to chemical safety, emissions reductions, and supplier engagement. Responsible buying practices can increase the impact of these efforts by offering suppliers the support and resilience they need to meet expectations and improve performance.
The shift to more responsible purchasing begins with a simple question: if we want suppliers to do better, what do we need to change first?
Explore our Supplier Engagement services
Create trusted relationships across your supply chain and drive tangible business benefits through collaboration, communication, and transparency.
We are the world’s leading purpose driven, digitally enabled, science-based activator. And always welcome inquiries and partnerships to drive positive change together.
![Anthesis logo](data:image/svg+xml,%3Csvg xmlns="http://www.w3.org/2000/svg" viewBox="0 0 300 80"%3E%3C/svg%3E "Reducing Sourcing Risks with Responsible Purchasing Practices")
