Better Cotton History
Earlier company descriptions, brand line-ups, store counts and photographs from the history of Better Cotton, kept for historical reference.
← Back to the current Better Cotton profile
The Company Description of Its Time
The Better Cotton Initiative (BCI) is a global not-for-profit organisation and the largest cotton sustainability program in the world - the whole of its identity in one sentence, exactly as the historical profile states it. BCI exists to make global cotton production better for the people who produce it, better for the environment it grows in and better for the sector's future. It is filed in this names directory among companies because that is where the industry looks for it: a cotton grower, a mill, a brand or a retailer asking 'who runs the Better Cotton system?' lands on a names page, and this filing answers with the organisation's own description of its system rather than a paraphrase.
What the System Is Designed To Do
The system is designed to ensure the exchange of good practices, and to encourage the scaling up of collective action to establish Better Cotton as a sustainable mainstream commodity. Three design goals deserve separating, because readers conflate them. First, exchange of good practices: knowledge moves between producers rather than staying on one farm. Second, collective action at scale: the program is built for many actors changing together, not for a single showcase supplier. Third, the destination: Better Cotton as a mainstream commodity - sustainability positioned as the normal way the world's most-used apparel fiber is grown, not as a niche premium line.
That is also why an initiative, rather than a brand, earns a full filing here. Cotton sits underneath a large share of the other profiles in this letter - the blank tees of Broder Bros., the knitwear color story of Benetton, the denim and shirts of the department stores - and BCI is the names directory's pointer to the sustainability system attached to that fiber. The original photograph is carried by reference in the gallery below, and the preserved routes lead to the BCI cotton page and the textile fiber manufacturer section of Apparel Search, where the fiber side of the industry is filed.
Photos
More to Explore on Apparel Search
References & Further Reading
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