Nest at the Fast Company Innovation Festival!

Nest‘s COO, Chris van Bergen, joined West Elm SVP of Global Sourcing and Williams Sonoma Inc. CSR, Douglas Guiley on the “fast track” as part of Fast Company’s 2016 Innovation Festival. A small group of entrepreneurs who gathered at the West Elm Broadway store to learn more about Nest and West Elm’s unique for-profit-nonprofit partnership to help empower and advance the global population of artisans and homeworkers. Chris and Doug shed light on their many travels around the world together to pilot the Nest Artisan Advancement Project Steering Committee’s standards for ethical production in homes and small workshops. While such standards exist to regulate factories, they are hardly applicable when it comes to decentralized supply chains that bear the complications of sub-contractors, piece-rate payments and and often informal policies. The goal for this project is to bring radically improved transparency to the world outside of factories, so that artisans are better protected and empowered – and so that brands in turn, can feel comfortable purchasing from them. Not a pass-fail system, the standards map directly to business development programming and education programs that Nest is able to provide. As always, a unified effort is the strongest kind — this is why we are proud to be in the company of pioneering brands like Eileen Fisher, Jaipur Living, Maiyet, Patagonia, PVH, West Elm, and Target who have accepted these standards and helping us to pilot them around the world. Learn more about this project and its industry-wide implications by reading the Fast Company story that ran today!