Responsible Operations
Responsible Operations
We pride ourselves on doing what is right, not what is easy. Ensuring that we conduct our business in a socially responsible manner is an important aspect of that. It’s also no good placing high expectations on our operations to make them sustainable if we don’t seek out suppliers that have the same high standards. All suppliers to Games Workshop must share and agree to uphold our high standards as part of any supply contract and ensure that they maintain appropriate controls with a thorough understanding and proper management of ethical and sustainable sourcing risks.
Ethical sourcing
The sustainability standards that we hold our products and operations to extend into our supply chain. We work with the ICTI Ethical Supply Chain Programme (ESCP) as a means to evaluate and assure us that our suppliers operate to the same standards we do with respect to environmental, business ethics, human rights, and health and safety. All suppliers of raw materials, components, and goods intended for resale by us must sign up as a member of the ESCP. Upon joining, each supplier will be evaluated by the ESCP to understand the ethical, environmental, and social supply chain risks associated with their operations. Each supplier will then need to complete specific assurance activities depending on the determined level of risk.
Safeguarding
Games Workshop is committed to ensuring that its stores and events are safe, especially for Children and Adults who are vulnerable or potentially at risk from harm. To that end, we have an internal team of Safeguarding Officers who handle safeguarding concerns, operate a safeguarding policy and train all employees in customer facing jobs on safeguarding annually. To the extent in which the country allows, retail staff are criminal records checked.
Product Safety
Games Workshop’s team of specialist product safety staff work closely with our manufacturing team, buyers, Warhammer studio and suppliers to ensure that our products are safe and comply with relevant legislation. The business maintains membership of several trade associations in order to keep abreast of best practices and upcoming regulatory change. These include the British Toy and Hobby Association and the Toy Association.
During development, Games Workshop’s products and their components are subject to safety checks in order to appropriately manage any risk, physical or chemical, presented by our products. We conduct further testing at external, nationally accredited laboratories to verify our in-house checks and confirm the physical and chemical safety of products.
Due to Games Workshop’s vertically integrated business model, the majority of our products are manufactured and packed in-house. This allows us to maintain tight control over the raw materials that go into our products, and over the process of assembling and packing them into finished goods. Both in-house and third party supplied items are subject to approval and change control processes, in order to ensure that they meet our requirements and those specifications are understood by all parties. Games Workshop maintains a supplier manual which sets out our requirements for safety, product compliance and substances of concern to suppliers of raw materials, components and finished goods. For third party supplied items where non-conformity would present a higher level of risk, we engage global testing, inspection and certification bodies to visit factories, select samples at random, and conduct lab testing to verify compliance. Our product and component specifications are designed to meet relevant legal requirements.
In order to control product quality and compliance, Games Workshop operates a quality management system, with relevant staff trained on quality and safety checks. Our quality management system ensures compliance with UK and international toy safety legislation. Our products are subject to external testing, including KC certification for South Korea, and CCC certification for China, which is also subject to additional external audits. Games Workshop has a unified process across the global business to manage the location and quarantine of stock in the event that a quality or safety issue is suspected, and should it be appropriate, our recall process would be invoked.