“Now both the media and the end consumers are putting pressure on all companies to be able to answer questions about where their things are produced and to ensure that they are made under good conditions”, says Signe Mørk Sørensen, the CSR consultant of BRICpro. BRICpro is a good example of how companies can actually change bad habits and create a healthy and strong business through ethical and transparent production. In a professional little room at CSE (Copenhagen School of Entrepreneurship) I was introduced to the co-founder of BRICpro, Nichlas, his CSR consultant, Signe and one of the company’s clients, Emilie. Nichlas was very talkative and open from the moment we met and I imagine that this approach perfectly represents the transparency of his business. BRICpro was founded in 2011 by Nichlas Hassing and Mads Bisgaard Christensen, and its mission is to help companies in the electronics, furniture and textile industries to collaborate with ethical production places in Brazil, Russia, India and China (in other words, the “BRIC” countries).
“We saw a business market opportunity back then. The market now is much more interested in what BRICpro has to offer because the end consumers are. Consumers are more interested in how people are treated and they demand that they are treated in accordance with their human rights”, explains Nichlas. Although this whole concept is very close to that of a sourcing house, BRICpro also has its own CSR department and standards, and as Nichlas says, they have merged the sourcing house logic with an NGO concept. To date they have visited 250 factories in China, of which only 50 managed to meet their CSR criteria. Signe continued by giving us further details on how the company works: “The way we start with all of our clients is to either provide them with a factory contact or take charge of the end to end production. Afterwards, many companies choose to proceed with additional services”.
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