Ethical Making: The Fair Luxury Pledge
The Ethical Making Resource is a research-led platform for sharing information about responsible and sustainable practice in the jewellery and silversmithing industry. It has been developed by The Scottish Goldsmiths Trust with support from The Goldsmiths’ Centre. This blog post outlines a discussion about the Fair Luxury Pledge between Fair Luxury team member and Pledge pioneer Anna Loucah and Dr. Karen Westland, Programme Manager of the Ethical Making Resource and fellow Fair Luxury member.
Fair Luxury is a voluntary group of likeminded professionals who have come together with the aim of inspiring, encouraging and facilitating best ethical practice within the jewellery industry. Focusing on these goals, we conceived of the ‘Pledge’ – the intention being to motivate change and offer a support network to those in the industry wishing to take their business in a more environmentally conscious direction.
What was the industry response to the Fair Luxury Pledge?
It has been incredibly positive. We have always found the industry press to be very supportive of our work as Fair Luxury. We have been covered in all major publications – and even internationally! We were also thrilled to be nominated for ‘Campaign or collaboration of the year’ at the UK Jewellery Awards 2021.
Could you outline what the Fair Luxury Pledge creation process is?
The concept is simple - decide to take one time-bound step – big or small – towards improving one area of your business - share it with the Fair Luxury community and join the movement!
As a group, Fair Luxury felt that there would be any number of individuals and business’s out there wishing to improve their ethical practice but might not know where or how to start. With that in mind, we decided to create a space where we could come together and motivate each other to take one single step towards a quantifiable goal within a supportive and encouraging environment.
We were careful to emphasise that this should not become a chore but rather should stand as a positive challenge with an achievable goal.
Please give a few examples of the key areas businesses and makers have chosen to focus on in their Fair Luxury Pledge?
To create a strong, focused network and enable sharing across similar targets, we have broken the Pledge down into general areas in which each individual can find alignment within the group as a whole. For example, topics such as B-Corp certification and sustainable packaging are both very popular areas of research and so each have a dedicated group within the wider community. Also included are metals, gemstones and educational topics.
What support exists to help your pledgers on their journey?
At Fair Luxury, we are really passionate about building a supportive and vibrant community that is very much focused on strength in numbers. As such, we aim to hold quarterly dedicated Pledge sessions as part of our regular on-line Open House events. During each session we generally look further into one specific topic and share news and developments.
We also make time to reach out to the Pledge community and encourage members to share progress reports – or even reports of no progress! It’s a very realistic and open space where all are welcome to bring their experiences.
Of course, we also encourage Pledgees to bring a friend who is thinking of joining – the more the merrier!
How has the Fair Luxury Pledge supported positive action?
The mantra of the Pledge has always been to take one step in the right direction – no matter how big or small. We all live busy lives and so the hope is, that by making a statement of intent, that act in itself will generate momentum towards positive action.
We received 150 pledges in 2021 alone and we hope that with this amount of support we have played a small part of a big change!
Please share a few words with those considering making a Fair Luxury Pledge.
You can find loads of information about getting started on our website. There’s a step-by-step guide and also the recent addition of a progress tracker which you can download and use to map out your steps towards your goal.
Perhaps you have been wanting to look into greening your studio practice for a while or produce a collection in traceable gold. Maybe you’d like to take a leap into working towards a specific certification – the way you design your pledge is completely up to you. You can also make it anonymously if you’d rather keep it under your hat for the time being. Or you can shout about it on social media and we’ll share it across our platforms too!
What are you waiting for?! MAKE A FAIR LUXURY PLEDGE