hospitalitystyle.com

(July 2009) posted on Tue Jul 14, 2009 EDT

The next time a supplier makes a pitch, step up and ask the tough questions on provenance.

By Mary Scoviak

Over dinner with an industry supplier last week, the conversation turned from the expected speculation on whether the economy has hit bottom to talk about where business is growing. And that, inevitably, led to China. He'd been in China several times in recent months to look at various products and possible partnerships. While he saw some interesting options for both, he wanted some wait-and-think time. Why? His company needed time to run the corporate equivalent of a comprehensive background check before making a move.

"We're getting grilled about our practices, our supply chain, our social and environmental programs by the people we do business with," he said. "It's part of corporate culture-- the new ‘due diligence.'"

Are you one of the companies doing the "grilling"? If not, you should be. Your request for information from any manufacturer or distributor should include questions about who's making the product, under what working conditions and with what kind of standards -- both in terms of quality and sustainability.

Price is the elephant in the room right now, and even after the economy turns up, clients aren't likely to give designers an unlimited budget. But, cost goes beyond price. As this manufacturer pointed out, he saw great chrome-plated fixtures from two different Chinese companies at a fraction of the prices charged in the U.S. But, when he did factory visits, he found that one had extensive water purification facilities to clean up the effluent from the manufacturing process while the other had "some workers with hoses washing all the byproducts into a drain." From the looks of a nearby bay area near a residential development, that drain wasn't exactly carrying that water far enough away.

That same scenario is played out in every country in the world. No, you can't be expected to have someone on the ground to check out every supplier. But you can network aggressively through your hotel, restaurant, spa and cruise clients who do have local offices. Taking a cue from the fashion industry, you can also work together, with industry associations and with Hospitality Style, to create an organization that would be the hospitality industry's litmus test for socially and environmentally products -- furniture, fixture and equipment that not only looked beautiful but made us all feel a little more beautiful for specifying, buying and using them.