Fashion Transparency & Artisan Rights: Carry Somers on the Crafted Report
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In this Good to Great Podcast episode, host Masrur Rahman sits down with Carry Somers, co-founder of Fashion Revolution and the League of Artisans, to explore a central paradox of modern fashion: an industry built on the skill of artisans that has systematically rendered those artisans invisible. Only 4 percent of major fashion brands disclose soil testing data at the facilities where artisans produce textiles. Only 12 percent monitor air quality. The rest publish sustainability reports that say almost nothing about the people whose hands actually make the product. With the publication of the Crafted Report and its companion diagnostic framework, the Artisans Index, Carry brings this paradox into sharp focus. What emerges is not a critique dressed as conversation, but a blueprint, rigorous, specific, and urgent, for an entirely different model of industry transparency that places South Asia's artisans at the center rather than the margins.
Tune in to hear about:
Why the transparency gap in artisan production is not an information problem but a justice problem, economic, cultural, and environmental, that cannot be solved by publishing data in the same formats that have failed artisans for decades
How the Crafted Report benchmarks 50 major fashion brands and exposes selective transparency, revealing what brands willingly disclose versus what they deliberately withhold about artisanal working conditions
Why culture and ecology are structurally interdependent, and how erratic rainfall and environmental degradation are not just threatening craft traditions but destroying centuries of accumulated intelligence about sustainable production
The practical tools reshaping transparency at scale: eco-mapping for informal producers, blockchain verification to make deception harder, and Digital Product Passports that make artisans visible at the point of purchase
How South Asia's artisan networks can shift from being invisible labour to co-creators of future-proof systems, and shape global accountability standards for decades to come