Responsible Business Practice

As part of a global company sourcing raw materials and products from across the world, it’s vital that we trade fairly and ethically with our suppliers, and support them in protecting the environment and promoting workers’ rights. We strive to keep people safe and continuously improve our impact on the world. Upholding responsible business practices is also an integral part of retaining our customers’ trust and loyalty.

Ethical trading

We’ve built strong partnerships with our suppliers over many years and work hard to ensure that they respect all relevant laws and regulations. This starts with selecting the best suppliers from the outset. In particular, we ask any potential new supplier to demonstrate that they meet our high ethical and environmental standards.

Our parent company, American Greetings, has a base in Shenzhen, China, where around 40 employees work with our suppliers in Asia. This is where we source the majority of our cards, to help fulfil our orders. We prioritise working with trusted, long-term suppliers, and collaborate with our Shenzhen team to help ensure that we audit all suppliers regularly to comply with legal requirements and maintain high ethical, quality and environmental standards. The team at Shenzhen also research more sustainable or innovative options. Importantly, we also share our orders among key suppliers with whom we do business regularly. This helps to avoid placing too much pressure on individual companies and their workers, particularly at peak times such as Christmas and Mother’s Day. View our Ethical Trading Policy.

UK Greetings is also a member of the Supplier Ethical Data Exchange (SEDEX), a global ethical trade organisation promoting responsible sourcing practices.

­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­Promoting human rights

Protecting the rights of everyone who contributes to the creation of our products – both our employees and workers in our supply chain – is our top priority. We focus on enabling people to work in safe conditions, promoting dignified work and preventing modern slavery. View our Human Rights Policy.

Keeping people safe

Our people’s safety is our top priority, and we have rigorous processes in place to prevent hazards to health, accidents and injury at work.

Optimising our business practices

We continuously seek to improve our impact on the world throughout the life of our cards, from forest to recycling:

  • Preventing deforestation – We work closely with our suppliers to help ensure that every single card and paper product can be physically traced back to sustainably managed forests.
  • Protecting endangered habitats – We work with the World Land Trust™ to offset CO2, resulting from the manufacture of paper and board to produce our single cards, by only using Carbon Balanced paper.
  • Low carbon transport – We partner with world-class sea freight providers, enabling us to achieve zero net carbon emissions.
  • Conserving resources – We strive to use materials and resources efficiently, as we move towards sending zero operational waste to landfill.
  • Sustainable operations – We’re increasing our use of renewable energy and reducing our energy consumption, sourcing electricity from solar, hydro and wind power and introducing LED lighting in our distribution centres, for example. In 2019, we reduced our carbon footprint by 400 tonnes simply by improving our energy efficiency.
  • Optimising packaging – We aim to reduce and where possible, avoid packaging through new and innovative design solutions (including our Go Naked range of cellophane-free cards), prioritising sustainable and recycled content, with an aim for all our packaging to be recyclable.

Policy

We strive to meet the highest possible environmental standards. Our distribution facilities at Cannon Way and Bretton Park sites are certified ISO 14001, a globally recognised standard for environmental management.