Efforts to improve the fashion industry’s purchasing practices have hit a wall, according to a new benchmarking tool from Cascale.
Designed to track year-over-year improvements in sourcing behavior, the tool revealed a troubling reality: efforts to ensure decent working conditions across supply chains are stagnating.
The 2025 Garment Industry Scorecard—the first joint analysis from Cascade and Better Buying Institute (BBI) since February’s acquisition—measured buyer performance across seven key purchasing areas. Informed by anonymous input from more than 1,200 suppliers during BBI’s latest Purchasing Practice Index (BBPPI) ratings cycle, the scorecard reflects the experiences of facilities employing over 10 million workers—roughly one in six across the global apparel value chain.
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The conclusion? In the doldrums, across the board.
“The BBPPI scores provide us with a critical baseline on where we are, as an industry, on purchasing practices,” said Katie Hess, head of product at Cascale Better Buying, a program under the Cascale and BBPPI alliance. “I’m pleased to see that brand and retailer progress has been broadly maintained—even during a period of unprecedented global and geopolitical turbulence as a result of the ongoing trade tariffs uncertainty.”
Most category scores declined by a point or two—a concerning sign of stagnation, given the global and geopolitical pressures facing the industry. The Planning and Forecasting category had the steepest decline, dropping from 59 to 56 points as over 37 percent of suppliers identified this category as the most critical area for improvement. The aggregate purchasing practices score, meanwhile, dipped from 67 to 66.
“At this late stage in the game, stagnation is not good enough,” Hess continued. “The urgent need for collective, committed, whole-industry action on purchasing practices is starkly clear.”
The BBPPI lets garment manufacturers anonymously rate buyer behavior, creating a transparent benchmark. The organization’s subscribers—like Adidas, Amazon, Patagonia and Ralph Lauren—can then leverage this “short, subjective, high-level look” data to course-correct.
The scorecard’s results are presented visually, using a star-based system to flag areas of strength and weakness, scored out of a possible 100 points. The early findings offer a taste of the topline data expected from the forthcoming BBPPI report, which the multi-stakeholder organization will publish mid-September during its annual meeting in Hong Kong.
“With Better Buying now part of Cascale, we have an unprecedented opportunity to drive up action at scale, by bringing together all key stakeholders to embed fair purchasing principles as the norm in global supply chains,” said Fiona Sadler, global head of responsible sourcing at Marks and Spencer and Cascale board director. “And achieve our mission of decent work for all.”
