From assessment to action: How retailers can drive human rights due diligence progress across their brands
By Hendrine Stelwagen, Industry Alignment and Business Development Expert at Fair Wear
For retailers, assessing the brands in their portfolio is part of their own human rights due diligence. Questionnaires can help create a baseline understanding of due diligence maturity, but meaningful impact depends on what happens next: dialogue, implementation, follow-up and accountability.
As due diligence expectations grow — driven by legislation like the EU Corporate Sustainability Due Diligence Directive and the EU Forced Labour Regulation — retailers are increasingly expected to demonstrate not just that they have assessed their brand partners, but that they are actively supporting improvement across their portfolio. This is where the retailer's role becomes even more impactful.
The Retailer Brand Due Diligence Questionnaire
A harmonised questionnaire developed through The Industry We Want — a multi-stakeholder initiative co-founded by Fair Wear, ETI, and Cascale — makes that starting point easier for everyone. The Retailer Brand Due Diligence Questionnaire (RBDDQ) was developed collaboratively by leading European retailers — including Zalando, ASOS, ABOUT YOU, Boozt, Ellos Group, New Look, and The Very Group — with subject-matter support from Cascale and Fair Wear.
The RBDDQ is grounded in the OECD Due Diligence Guidance for Responsible Business Conduct and available free of charge. Its aim is to provide one standardised, open-source questionnaire that retailers and brands can use together, rather than a fragmented landscape of different tools and platforms that creates duplication and reporting burden, particularly for smaller brands.
In practice, the questionnaire helps brands assess the maturity of their due diligence, establish a credible entry point, identify gaps in policies and processes, and prioritise action where risks are most significant. For retailers, it provides a consistent picture of where brands stand and where they need support.
From assessment to action
Retailers have a more active role to play than compliance checking alone. Rather than simply assessing whether brands meet a threshold, they can invest in helping them get there — acting as a genuine catalyst for HRDD capability building across their portfolio.
Our pilot with De Bijenkorf is an example of what retailers can do practically to stimulate human rights due diligence. The Dutch retailer funded and ran a five-month HRDD learning programme for a selected group of its brand partners, in collaboration with Fair Wear. Through self-study, peer sessions, and one-to-one coaching built around the 6 steps of HRDD, brands identified gaps, deepened their understanding of relevant legislation, and took concrete action. Several went on to pursue further work on the human rights issues the programme had surfaced.
De Bijenkorf didn't just ask brands where they stood, but helped them move forward.
A more proactive approach
Retailers that combine assessment with genuine capacity building can raise the baseline across their entire brand portfolio and strengthen their own due diligence in the process.
Whether you are a retailer looking to introduce HRDD to your brand partners, or a brand looking to build on an existing system, the HRDD Academy offers a practical path forward — combining self-paced modules, peer learning, and expert guidance. Learn more or book a call with the Fair Wear team.
