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Person wearing brown outfit and silver Essen shoes
30 Sep
Person wearing brown outfit and silver Essen shoes

These 3 Brands Improved Their Sustainability Ratings in September

Our editors curate highly rated brands that are first assessed by our rigorous ratings system. Buying through our links may earn us a commission—supporting the work we do. Learn more.

 

We celebrate the brands that have improved their public disclosures and moved up a level on our ratings scale.

Which fashion brands are improving their practices?

Brand ratings are at the heart of Good On You’s mission to make shopping your values simpler. We have been rating brands since 2015—more than 6,000 to date—uncovering the ones doing harm and highlighting those doing better for people, the planet, and animals.

Our ratings team continually re-rates brands—annually for large brands and every 18 months for smaller ones—using the most up-to-date information and data available, so you can see accurate details about how the brands you’re interested in are impacting the values that matter to you. And when there is a significant change in a brand’s public disclosure, or a public or stakeholder concern about changes in the company’s practices, we’ll also initiate a review. In 2023, re-rates represented around 36% of the total brands we analysed.

Last month, 29 brands’ ratings were reviewed by our analysts, but just three improved beyond our middling “It’s a Start” score. And just like in our previous roundups of improved brands, they were all small businesses. Once again, we see that large brands who have the power and influence to effect huge changes in sustainable fashion simply aren’t working hard enough to do so. Scroll on to discover more about the brands that are making efforts to reduce their impact on people, the planet, and animals.

How Good On You rates brands

Good On You is the most comprehensive and widely trusted brand ratings system for fashion. Our mission is to help you make better choices.

The Good On You ratings system captures the complexity of sustainability, aggregating up to 1,000 data points across 100 key issues for each brand. Our team of analysts use their industry-leading expertise and ratings tech to efficiently assess fashion brands’ impacts across the entire supply chain.

Brands receive an overall score that is converted into a rating on a clear and comparable five-point scale, from “We Avoid” all the way up to “Great”. You can download our app or check out the directory to discover the best brands for you.

For this report, we looked at the data for the 29 brands our analysts re-rated in September 2024, and highlighted the ones whose overall scores increased enough for them to go up a level on our rating scale, for example, from “It’s a Start” to “Good”, or from “Good” to “Great”. We haven’t focused on brands whose ratings increased but were still bad overall, for example, from “We Avoid” to “Not Good Enough”. The idea is to encourage brands that are actively making progress and reducing their impacts.

Winden

Rated: Good

Winden is a New York City-based jewellery and lifestyle brand born from founder Rebecca Mapes’ desire to live a more sustainable life. The brand manufactures locally and limits production runs to minimise waste. It also uses lower-impact materials and traces most of its supply chain. Winden’s rating moved up from “Not Good Enough” to “Good” in our recent rerate.

See the rating.

Shop Winden.

ESSĒN

Rated: Good
Essen patent leather boots

“I founded ESSĒN in 2016 as a response to a fashion cycle that overproduces more than it carefully crafts, chases trends more than it determines classics, and wastes more than it sustains,” says founder Marre Muijs of her brand, which has achieved a “Good” rating, up from “It’s a Start” in our recent review. The shoes and accessories brand, which limits its production runs and uses low-waste cutting techniques, eschews the fashion calendar in favour of a single, permanent collection.

See the rating.

Shop ESSĒN.

Courbet

Rated: Good
A classic gold solitaire engagement ring by Courbet.

Courbet is a French high jewellery brand that uses a medium proportion of lower-impact materials, including recycled gold, which limits the amount of chemicals, water and wastewater used in production. Courbet joins ESSĒN and Winden as a “Good”-rated brand, having improved from “It’s a Start” in our review.

See the rating.

Shop Courbet.

Editor's note

Feature image via ESSĒN, all other images via brands mentioned. Good On You publishes the world’s most comprehensive ratings of fashion brands’ impact on people, the planet, and animals. Use our directory to search thousands of rated brands.

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