The F*R*E Rating System
Welcome to The F*R*E* Rating System.
Updates will be posted here as they come.
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We at Reflective Images are deeply concerned about the ethical imprint of our product. We have sought to implement a wide range of environmentally responsible practices and have also looked for suppliers that share our core values.
We wanted our website to fully reflect our commitment, yet we were not happy with the labels of “fair trade” as far as jewelry was concerned. My research as author of this blog led me to find that several companies were using “fair” and “eco” labels without exactly saying what that means. One could even ask the question, as if have, Is There Such A Thing As Fair Trade Jewelry?
Here, we emphasizes what we consider a best practice at this point: Transparency linked to product. All the efforts so far around fair trade and ethical sourcing have focused primarily on three principles which we called Fair, Responsible, and Ecological (FRE).
1. Fair: Includes labor that goes into the making of the piece. Labor includes all elements from the mine to the manufacturing.
2. Responsible: Concerns outreach to community, support of diversity and being a good example of a corporate citizen.
3. Ecological: The environmental impact of the various components of the piece of jewelry, from mine to manufacturing to the jewelry office and showroom.
Categorizing according to the FRE makes one’s strong and weak sourcings public. It is a snapshot of a jewelry company’s process in attempting to develop ethical sourcing without the supply chain to fully actualize the vision.
The current ratings in our website, are a first pass at categorizing every piece of jewelry we make. The process is ongoing and we continue to dig deeper and improve the level of transparency in the system to the best of our ability.
We offer our FRE program as an Open Source approach which we hope will be adopted by other companies. It is adaptable enough to eventually allow us to rate all of our approximately 3000 inventory pieces from which we produce about 8634 pieces of finished jewelry a year, the vast majority of which is manufactured in our Santa Fe, NM studio.
FRE is a trade marked rating system for jewelry manufacturers developed by Reflective Images. However, it is an open source system and you are welcome to use it with permission, free of any cost. If a jewelry company wishes to use FRE, contact Marc Choyt for permission. (Email: reflective at cybermesa.com or 505-988-7393 X12)
