Teixidors

A. The main facts about the activities of the company.

Teixidors is a company specialized in designing and manufacturing of first quality textile products. They were founded in 1983 in Terrassa by Juan Ruiz and Marta Ribás. Currently, they are employing 43 people and despite being a small company 40% of their production is being sold abroad.

They base its activity on transforming natural fibres such as cashmere, linen, silk and wool into handmade textiles made with wooden looms. They offer high quality products made with best quality raw materials and what makes them special is that every wear is completely different from the others and has special features depending on the weaver that makes it. Their products are unique, unrepeatable and made with high quality raw materials.

Despite producing in an artisan way, their catalogue contains a wide variety of products like scarves, shawls, plaids, bed blankets/bedspreads, cushions, towels, carpets and many other types of clothes and textiles.

B. The Ethical challenges this company is addressing.

The company is really concerned with the issue of sustainable business. They are trying to reach sustainability basing the project on their two main actions:
On one hand, they employ people with learning difficulties in risk of social exclusion. They base their activities in what is called "labour therapy". They understand that working is profitable for developing people attitudes and they believe that they must have the same work opportunities as people without disabilities. In Teixidors, workers with learning difficulties have the opportunity to learn a job and acquire autonomy step by step thanks to their instructors and colleagues. Thus, sustainability is not just an environmental issue, it also includes ethical topics like social integration or responsible consumption.

On the other hand, the other ethical challenge they face is, the fact of having the less possible impact in the environment. They use natural sources, they adapt their production to demand requirements, so they don’t overproduce and they bet for responsible consumption.

Moreover, they have recently faced a financing problem so they turned to the social economy, asking for money through and emission of participating debt, a way of investing on an “ethical” way because of the purpose of the cooperative.

C. What makes you believe this company is really ethical and why you trust it?

We believe this company because nowadays there are plenty of opportunities for textile companies to produce cheap clothes, employing people without disabilities or exploiting them in sweatshops, exporting massively and acquiring cheap raw materials treated with chemical products.

There are not many companies that have as a main objective a social issue. Usually, companies are headed uniquely for profits and they treat corporate social responsibility as a secondary thing.

But creating a business which has a clear and principal objective which is the employment of people with learning difficulties and making it sustainable is a great contribution to society. What this people are doing has a lot of importance: they are offering an opportunity to people that can have lots of difficulties in live. Through offering them a job, they are not only making them economically independent, they are also helping them to develop their social abilities so they can become socially integrated.

Therefore, the company survives over the years by having little profits kept as reserves because they show themselves committed with social issues.

D.The possible challenges facing the company in the future and how you think this company may improve.

The clear challenge they are facing is to survive and grow keeping their essence and ethical values.

Obviously this company cannot compete with giants in the textile industry that are profit-maximizing companies. However, they are offering an extreme handcrafted high quality product using high quality raw materials. If they create good designs, they can be as attractive as any other product because they have the advantage that the product is not massively produced. Products made by hand are always more valuable than others.

We believe that a way of improving is to be more visible. People have to know which are their unique products as well as their business philosophy and their contribution to society.

Finally, we think that it could be really positive for the company to keep their international expansion to be able to grow and to increase their possibilities in an extreme competitive market like the textile market.