Welcome to our updated Responsibly ANN corporate responsibility reporting website!2011 has been an exciting year for ANN INC., full of important achievements and strong financial results. It has been a time for us to reflect on the values that have been a part of our company since our founding over 50 years ago and to look forward to future growth and innovation.
Being ANN INC. means we put our client first in everything we do. By listening, understanding and responding to her changing needs, we continually ask “what would our client think” when it comes to important decisions. She guides our Company values. She inspires our beautiful designs. She challenges us to be our best selves every day.
We know that our client has high standards and expects us to take a responsible approach to managing our business. She wants to feel confident that we are committed to protecting the health, safety and rights of the workers who make our clothes, and that we are reducing the environmental impact of our operations and throughout our supply chain. Responsibly ANN provides the guiding principles that help us achieve that mission, and by regularly sharing our progress and establishing our future goals, we hold ourselves accountable to our corporate responsibility commitments.
In our quest to learn and improve, this year we carried out a materiality analysis to help us prioritize current and emerging issues. We reached out to our clients, our associates and other stakeholders to gather feedback on both our performance and our reporting, and examined leading practices in our industry. We learned a great deal through this process. In some cases, the review provided a strong validation of our current focus areas and accomplishments, where in other cases we identified areas of opportunity. We continue to deepen our understanding of the issues that are important to our business and our client and will work to address them in the future.
This year we are pleased to announce our new corporate goal to reduce green house gas (GHG) emissions by 8% per square foot by 2015. This will not be an easy task, and we have many programs to help us get there, including using new technologies and leveraging the power of our passionate associates.
In addition to this aggressive goal, we are also setting our sights on reducing our waste, improving the lives of workers in our global supply chain through training and industry collaboration and identifying opportunities to reduce the environmental impact that occurs deeper in our supply chain.
We’re proud that our brands not only bring great style and fashion, but are also rooted in our commitment to responsibility. We will continue to listen to our client and to operate a company that will make her proud to wear our products and confident in the knowledge that they are produced ethically and responsibly.
We thank you for your interest, and I look forward to sharing future reports on our continued progress.
Responsibly,
Kay Krill
President and Chief Executive Officer
