Wages, Weaving, and What Brands Won't Disclose: How the Crafted Report Is Redefining Transparency for South Asia's Artisan Economy
4 percent. That is how many of the world's major fashion brands disclose soil testing data at the facilities where artisans produce their textiles. 12 percent monitor air quality. The rest publish sustainability reports that say almost nothing about the people whose hands actually make the product.
This single finding, drawn from a first-of-its-kind research initiative called the Crafted Report, captures the central paradox of modern fashion: an industry built on the skill of artisans that has systematically rendered those artisans invisible.
The Good to Great Podcast, hosted by Masrur Rahman, brought this paradox into sharp focus through a conversation with Carry Somers, co-founder of Fashion Revolution, the world's largest fashion activism movement, and co-founder of the League of Artisans, which published the Crafted Report and its companion diagnostic framework, the Artisans Index. Carry is also an internationally recognized author and changemaker whose work has reshaped how the industry thinks about accountability, cultural rights, and the relationship between ecology and craft.
What emerged was not a critique dressed as conversation. It was a blueprint, rigorous, specific, and urgent, for an entirely different model of industry transparency, 1 that places South Asia's artisans at the center rather than the margins.
01. Why Transparency Matters in South Asia
South Asia is home to craft traditions that have influenced global design for centuries. Handloom weaving in Bangladesh. Chikankari embroidery in Lucknow. Block printing in Rajasthan. Ajrak dyeing in Sindh. Leatherwork, natural dyeing, ikat, jamdani. These are not quaint heritage practices preserved for tourists. They are living knowledge systems that sustain tens of millions of livelihoods and shape the product lines of the world's most powerful fashion brands.
Yet the artisans who carry these traditions remain largely invisible in the supply chain disclosures that brands publish.
"Outside the luxury maisons where craft may be more integrated, artisan production is typically decentralized, home-based, or informal. It sits in a part of the supply chain where brands rarely measure their environmental harm, let alone take responsibility for it," Carry explains.
The consequences of this invisibility are concrete and compounding. They are economic: artisans face wage delays, lack access to credit, and are frequently required to finance raw materials upfront with no guarantee of timely payment. They are cultural: designs developed over generations are appropriated by global brands without recognition, consent, or benefit-sharing. And they are ecological: artisan communities whose practices depend on healthy soils, clean water, and biodiversity are exposed to environmental degradation that brands neither monitor nor mitigate.
"Too many brands still draw on traditional designs without free, prior, and informed consent. Artisans' intellectual and cultural contributions continue to be undervalued, despite underpinning the lucrative product lines of the world's biggest brands."
The transparency gap is not an information problem. It is a justice problem, economic, cultural, and environmental, and it will not be solved by publishing more data in the same formats that have failed artisans for decades.
02. The Crafted Report: Making the Invisible Visible
Published by the League of Artisans, the Crafted Report is the first research initiative to systematically benchmark how 50 major fashion brands disclose the impacts of artisanal textile production. Built in partnership with Keele University and supported by the Impact Plus Innovation Network, it combined academic research methodology with on-the-ground fieldwork, community interviews, and environmental data mapping.
The output is the Artisans Index, a diagnostic tool that evaluates brand disclosures across multiple indicators spanning wages, workplace safety, cultural rights, environmental monitoring, and ecological accountability.
The findings are damning in their specificity.
"What's disclosed is often uneven, superficial, and difficult to find, buried in corporate websites and sustainability reports instead of on product pages where customers can access it," Carry explains. "For instance, while most brands reveal the material composition of artisanal products, only 12 percent disclose air quality monitoring and just 4 percent disclose soil testing at tier-2 facilities."
These numbers expose a structural pattern. Brands are willing to disclose what flatters them: fiber content, certifications, broad commitments. They withhold information that would reveal the actual conditions under which artisanal production takes place. The Crafted Report makes this selective transparency visible for the first time, and in doing so, it reframes disclosure from a compliance exercise into a measure of genuine accountability.
What makes the report particularly significant is its refusal to treat artisan production as a niche concern. The global artisan economy is vast. The output flows into supply chains that reach every major retail market on earth. By benchmarking 50 brands against a rigorous methodology, the Crafted Report establishes a baseline that the industry can no longer ignore.
03. Culture and Ecology: 2 Sides of the Same Transparency
Here is where the Crafted Report makes its most radical intellectual contribution, and the point where Carry's thinking departs most sharply from conventional sustainability discourse.
"Too often sustainability is measured only in carbon, while cultural rights are treated as secondary or worse, as decorative."
The standard industry approach treats environmental sustainability and cultural preservation as separate domains. Carbon emissions belong to the environmental team. Artisan welfare belongs to the social responsibility team. Heritage preservation, if it is addressed at all, is handled by communications. The Crafted Report dismantles these silos by demonstrating that culture and ecology are structurally interdependent.
Craft is rooted in place. A natural dye tradition depends on specific soils, water quality, seasonal rainfall, and the availability of particular plants. When those ecological conditions degrade, the craft does not simply become more expensive. It becomes impossible. The knowledge dies because the ecosystem that sustained it has collapsed.
Carry cites India's Kutch region as a case study, where "erratic rainfall and rising salinity are disrupting dye traditions that have endured for centuries."
This is not a sentimental argument about preserving the past. It is a strategic argument about the future. Artisan knowledge systems represent centuries of accumulated intelligence about how to work with natural materials sustainably. In an industry desperately searching for alternatives to petrochemical-dependent production, that intelligence is not a cultural artifact. It is a competitive resource.
The Artisans Index operationalizes this insight by evaluating whether brands credit artisans, respect prior consent, and commit to benefit-sharing alongside environmental testing. It positions cultural rights not as a supplementary concern but as a core dimension of transparency.
"Safeguarding cultural heritage isn't a sideline," Carry emphasizes. "Artisans aren't just victims of ecological crises; they are innovators whose traditions can guide us towards more resilient futures."
04. Tools for Transparent Futures
Principles without mechanisms are press releases. The Crafted Report distinguishes itself by identifying practical tools that can make transparency operational at scale, including in the informal, decentralized workshops where most artisan production actually happens.
Eco-mapping is an open-source methodology that allows even small workshops to visually map water usage, waste flows, and energy consumption. It does not require sophisticated technology or advanced literacy. "This makes environmental stewardship accessible to informal producers, even those with low literacy," Carry explains. For an artisan economy where production is dispersed across millions of home-based workers, this accessibility is not a convenience. It is a prerequisite for any transparency system that claims to be inclusive.
Blockchain verification offers a mechanism to create tamper-proof records of wages paid, materials sourced, and environmental impacts measured. In supply chains where greenwashing is endemic and paper records are easily falsified, blockchain does not just improve transparency. It makes deception structurally harder. The technology is not a panacea, and Carry does not present it as 1. But as part of a broader transparency infrastructure, it addresses a real problem: the gap between what brands claim and what actually happens on the ground.
Digital Product Passports (DPPs) represent perhaps the most transformative tool in the report's framework. These are product-level digital records that link artisan contributions directly to the end consumer. "Imagine scanning a QR code and seeing not just the fiber breakdown but the names of the artisans, the dye plants used, and the environmental footprint for each product," Carry says.
DPPs shift transparency from something that exists in corporate reports to something that exists at the point of purchase. They make the artisan visible at exactly the moment when the consumer is making a buying decision. This is not incremental improvement. It is a structural redesign of how information flows through the fashion value chain.
Together, these 3 tools move transparency from static, annual reporting to dynamic, product-level engagement. They create the infrastructure for a system where accountability is continuous rather than periodic, and where the people who make the product are as visible as the brand that sells it.
05. South Asia's Blueprint for Change
The Crafted Report is diagnostic, but it is not only diagnostic. Its deeper ambition is to demonstrate that South Asia's artisan networks are not problems to be managed but leadership assets that can define the next generation of global transparency standards.
Carry describes the Artisans Index as "both diagnostic and solution-oriented. It shows us where the gaps are and where better practice is emerging. It shifts the conversation from artisans as invisible labour to artisans as co-creators of future-proof systems."
This reframing matters because it changes the power dynamics of the conversation. In the conventional model, transparency is something that brands do and artisans receive. The Crafted Report proposes a different architecture: 1 where artisan communities are active participants in defining what transparency means, what it measures, and who benefits from it.
For South Asia specifically, the blueprint carries particular weight. The region's craft traditions are already globally recognized. Its artisan workforce is among the largest on earth. Its governments are increasingly engaged with sustainability policy. The missing ingredient has been a rigorous, evidence-based framework that connects artisan realities to global accountability standards. The Crafted Report supplies that framework.
The opportunity is not merely to comply with emerging international standards like the EU's Corporate Sustainability Due Diligence Directive. It is to shape those standards, ensuring that the lived experience of South Asian artisans informs the rules that will govern global supply chains for decades to come.
06. Looking Ahead: Building Momentum
The Crafted Report is in its first year. Carry is clear-eyed about what that means.
"A baseline is just that, a starting point. The real movement comes in subsequent years when brands start to engage with the methodology and begin to see it not as criticism but as a roadmap."
The analogy to Fashion Revolution's own trajectory is instructive. When Fashion Revolution launched its Fashion Transparency Index, initial industry response ranged from indifference to hostility. Over time, as the methodology proved rigorous and the public engagement grew, brands began competing to improve their scores. The index became a de facto industry standard not because anyone mandated compliance, but because transparency became a reputational imperative.
Carry's ambition for the Artisans Index follows a similar arc: secure multi-year funding to track progress annually, expand coverage beyond clothing into homeware and other craft-intensive product categories, and amplify best practices so that leading brands create competitive pressure on laggards.
But her most powerful observation concerns the role of ordinary consumers.
"We know that citizens have power. The questions that we're all asking, where was this made, who made it, these are the questions the index is designed to answer. Customer curiosity can really help increase accountability."
This is not naive optimism. Fashion Revolution's #WhoMadeMyClothes campaign demonstrated that consumer questions, asked at sufficient volume, can shift corporate behavior. The Artisans Index gives those questions sharper teeth by providing the data infrastructure to evaluate whether brand responses are substantive or performative.
07. Storytelling as a Force for Transparency
Data creates accountability. Narrative creates understanding. The most effective transparency systems deploy both, and Carry's work has always operated at their intersection.
Her upcoming book, The Nature of Fashion, traces the intertwined history of plants and textiles across millennia.
"It is a vivid, impassioned, and celebratory journey through the history of how we learned to create clothing with plants," she explains. The book moves from ancient bark fibers through centuries of innovation to the present moment, revealing how deeply human civilization and textile craft have shaped each other.
This is not a detour from the transparency agenda. It is its foundation. The reason transparency matters, the reason anyone should care about soil testing at tier-2 facilities or benefit-sharing with artisan communities, is that fashion is not merely a commercial activity. It is a relationship between people, plants, animals, and ecosystems that stretches back to the earliest human societies.
When that relationship is made visible through storytelling, transparency stops being a technical compliance requirement and becomes something far more powerful: a recognition of mutual dependence. Consumers who understand that their cotton shirt traces back through specific soils, specific water systems, and specific human hands are more likely to ask the questions that hold brands accountable.
08. Conclusion: Unveiling a Transparent Future
The conversation between Masrur Rahman and Carry Somers exposes a truth that the fashion industry has spent decades avoiding: transparency is not a matter of publishing more data. It is a matter of valuing the people and ecosystems that sustain the industry's existence.
The Crafted Report, published by the League of Artisans, is South Asia's blueprint for a new kind of accountability. It integrates cultural rights with ecological resilience. It pairs innovation with heritage. It positions artisans not at the margins of global supply chains but at their intellectual and moral center.
The report's 1st-year findings are a baseline. The real test will come in subsequent years, as brands engage with the methodology, as consumers demand the information the Artisans Index is designed to surface, and as policymakers incorporate artisan realities into regulatory frameworks.
"Together, we can make sure that progress isn't just about reports, pledges, or the next initiative, but about real change that benefits artisans, garment workers, and the environment that craft depends on."
South Asia's artisans have sustained knowledge systems that predate the modern fashion industry by centuries. They have done so through ecological intelligence, cultural resilience, and an intimate understanding of the materials they work with. The least the industry can do is make their contributions visible. The most it can do is build systems worthy of their expertise.
Download the Crafted Report: https://leagueofartisans.org/crafted