This article is part of our ‘(Re)Made in Ghana’ series, which explores what one of the world’s largest circular fashion ecosystems — Kantamanto Market — can teach us about the future of fashion. You can read our series on ‘Made in Italy’, ‘Made in India’, and ‘Made in the UK’ through the provided links.
As the head of positive impact for the British surf brand Finisterre, Adele Gingell is not easily stopped. However, a non-profit campaign urging brands to reveal their production volumes did just that.
“I vividly remember being in our London store when our social media manager called to say we had been tagged in a post — not just once, but repeatedly,” she recalls. “You’d expect fast fashion brands to be tagged, but we were tagged alongside many other values-driven brands. And it wasn’t the industry asking; it was our customers. I called our CEO immediately, and we decided to go for it.”
Finisterre was among the first brands to take the leap and join Speak Volumes. This campaign, launched in 2023 by the Ghanaian American non-profit The Or Foundation, asks brands to publicly disclose their production volumes and eventually commit to reducing them. It’s a seemingly simple request aimed at addressing one of sustainable fashion’s most pressing questions: can the industry meet its sustainability goals if it continues to grow?
British surf brand Finisterre was an early adopter of Speak Volumes. The brand explains its involvement to consumers in terms they already care about: the impact of overproduction and textile waste on ocean health.
“Volume is the missing link that connects environmental impact, social harm, and consumer culture. It’s the fundamental question of our time,” says sustainability strategist Rachel Arthur. She authored a key report on fashion’s relationship with growth for the global non-profit Textile Exchange in 2024 and continues her work with the UN Environment Program. “To tackle overproduction and overconsumption, we need to know how much is being produced. Without that baseline, meaningful policy and accountability are impossible.”
The lack of solid data on production volumes is “an embarrassing data gap” for the fashion industry, says Liz Ricketts, co-founder and executive director of The Or Foundation. In the three years since Speak Volumes began, the foundation has directly asked 1,039 brands to join the campaign and share their annual production volumes. Only 193 have done so, including Collina Strada, Ninety Percent, and ELV Denim (others, like Swedish brand Asket, signed up but haven’t maintained their disclosures). The data collected by The Or Foundation is shared on the Speak Volumes website. Brands are also encouraged to communicate their production volumes in their impact reports and on social media. The long-term goal is to gather enough data to establish industry standards, so terms like small, medium, or large businesses can be partly defined by production volumes.
Without regulations requiring these disclosures, only 9% of fashion brands currently share their production volumes publicly, according to the latest “What Fuels Fashion?” report from advocacy group Fashion Revolution. Among those 14 brands, total annual production exceeds 4.3 billion items per year, offering a small glimpse into fashion’s enormous footprint. Estimates of the total number of garments produced each year vary widely, from 80 billion to 200 billion. Some hesitations stem from the lack of legal frameworks or disclosure requirements, as well as public perception concerns: Will small brands be judged too harshly without context on how much large brands produce? Will sharing production volumes backfire if the numbers increase over time?
“The root of the waste crisis is overproduction,” says Ricketts. “We have no business producing this many garments, and yet we continue to dance around the issue.””If we are serious about sustainability, that data gap should not exist.”
What does it take for a brand to Speak Volumes? Getting brands on board is no small feat, says fair fashion campaigner and content creator Venetia La Manna, who worked with The Or Foundation on the campaign.
“Publicly visible social media pressure has been a very effective tool, but it’s been a much more time-consuming process than I imagined,” she explains. “This year, specifically, my community tagged brands they wanted to join under my videos. I then followed up with comments on the brands’ posts, along with direct messages, emails, phone calls, and in-person meetings.”
Among the brands that joined are Finisterre and the underwear brand Stripe & Stare. “We are a B Corp, so the campaign was very easy for us to take part in because we already monitor our production and had the information ready,” says Stripe & Stare founder Katie Lopes. The brand’s production volumes rose by a third, from 325,560 pieces in 2023 to 435,312 pieces in 2024. “The hardest job for our merchandising team is predicting growth for the next year, and we don’t always get it right. Sometimes we overproduce, but we react quickly so that stock doesn’t sit unsold. If anything, we are usually a little too cautious and don’t produce enough, but I’d rather have it that way.”
Stripe & Stare has been disclosing its production volumes for two years now.
Similarly, calculating Finisterre’s production volumes was quick, says Gingell. “You can overcomplicate it, but it doesn’t need to be forensic accounting,” she says. “I simply pulled up our purchase orders from the previous year and added them up. It took two minutes.”
More recent signatories include British leather goods brand Mulberry, which published its production figures for the first time in its 2024/25 impact report, noting it was “following in the footsteps of our fellow B Corps.” Head of sustainability Rosie Wollacott told Vogue Business that the company hopes other brands will join Mulberry so the industry can “address issues surrounding the realities of textile waste, value, and responsibility in fashion.”
According to the report, Mulberry produced 191,795 units in 2024. “Using data from our planning team, we calculated the total units produced over the year, broken down by country of manufacture,” says Wollacott. “It’s information we already track when measuring our global carbon footprint, so we didn’t need to create any new processes to share it.”
Larger brands with complex, global supply chains managed by separate teams might have a harder time gathering the data, but it’s not impossible, says Arthur. “The data exists, but it’s often siloed across suppliers, regions, and systems, making it challenging to aggregate. Like much of the work in sustainability, it’s as much about political will as technical ability.” But it’s not impossible: brands including Adidas, Lululemon, and Mango have all shared production volumes in the past. For example, in 2022, Adidas produced 419 million pairs of shoes and 482 million apparel items, while Lululemon produced 141 million units, and Mango produced 155 million. (None responded to requests for comment.)
Disclosing production volumes isn’t part of the B Corp certification process, but a growing number of brands signed up to Speak Volumes are B Corps, including Mulberry, Finisterre, and Stripe & Stare.
Could policy drive momentum? One of the biggest barriers for brands to take part in the campaign is the lack of a level playing field, says Ricketts. If every brand had to disclose its production volumes, it would be easier for customers and policymakers to contextualize these figures.The risks would be lower if production volumes were known, and in theory, regulation could address this. However, policymakers have been hesitant to intervene so directly in the market, though this may change.
The Or Foundation launched Speak Volumes while advocating for global extended producer responsibility (EPR) laws that would adjust fees based on production scale. There are indications this could happen. Under new EPR rules, brands will likely need to report their unit production volumes to their regional Producer Responsibility Organisation (PRO) so fees can be scaled according to business size and proximity to fast fashion. However, this data will not be made public.
Other regulations have also approached the issue indirectly. France’s anti-fast fashion bill, for instance, distinguishes between fast fashion and ultra-fast fashion based partly on volume—defining fast fashion as around a thousand new products per day and ultra-fast fashion as nearly 12,000. The law imposes higher penalties on ultra-fast fashion brands, emphasizing that scale matters. Similarly, the EU’s Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive (CSRD) will require brands to disclose production volumes by weight, which will be public, but this metric doesn’t help consumers understand production at the individual garment level.
According to Ricketts, the varying disclosure requirements and metrics across regulations are creating confusion. “The regulations are not aligned,” she says. “Weight-based data isn’t useful to consumers or policymakers unless they know how much a sock weighs compared to a jacket. Tracking by weight also overlooks the labor involved in disassembling items for recycling or upcycling, which is very intensive. Many brands are willing to share unit-based production volumes, but they don’t want to report two different sets of figures publicly, especially when policy mandates reporting by weight.”
Nevertheless, Ricketts notes there is behind-the-scenes progress. “Even without public disclosure, many major brands are choosing to focus on lower volumes of higher-quality products,” she says. “Some have ambitious targets to replace new production with circular alternatives. That’s encouraging, and I think many would be surprised by the internal commitments these brands are making.”
Arthur adds that, as with any debate about growth, there are deeper tensions at play. “Politically, addressing production volumes faces resistance because it forces difficult conversations about limiting growth,” she explains. This has become especially relevant in Europe, where there is a push to boost competitiveness. “This industry profits from producing more. Anything that challenges that questions the entire system. We simply cannot meet sustainability goals if we continue to prioritize expansion.”
Frequently Asked Questions
FAQs Why Fashion Brands Dont Disclose Production Numbers
BeginnerLevel Questions
What does disclosing production numbers even mean
It means a brand publicly sharing exactly how many units it manufactures in a specific timeframe such as a year or a season
Why would I care how many clothes a brand makes
Because its a key indicator of their environmental impact and business model High numbers often link to overproduction waste and lower quality while lower more intentional numbers can suggest a more sustainable approach
Is it a legal requirement for brands to share this information
No in most countries there is no law forcing fashion brands to disclose their exact production volumes to the public Its considered proprietary business information
Dont brands brag about selling millions of items Sometimes but isnt that the same
They often highlight sales figures but rarely reveal production figures The difference between these two numbers is unsold inventory which is a major source of waste they often dont want to highlight
Intermediate Motivational Questions
Whats the main reason brands keep this a secret
The biggest reason is competition Exact production data can reveal a brands market share profit margins growth strategy and sourcing capabilities to rivals Its seen as a trade secret
How does not disclosing help them make more money
It allows for
Demand Manipulation Creating artificial scarcity or using constant new drops to drive impulse buys
Hiding Overproduction They can overproduce to ensure they never run out of stock then quietly discount or destroy unsold items without public backlash
Controlling Narrative They can market themselves as exclusive or sustainable without data to prove or disprove their actual scale and waste
Isnt this just a fast fashion problem
While fast fashion is the biggest offender due to its highvolume model many midrange and even some luxury brands also avoid transparency The pressure to grow and meet sales targets affects most of the industry
What are brands afraid will happen if they do disclose
They fear activists consumers and the media will use the data to
1 Calculate their exact environmental footprint
2 Ex