# I. How the supply chain allegations unfolded
Boohoo Group (Boohoo) was founded in 2006 in Manchester, England, as an online fashion retailer targeting young consumers globally. By leveraging a direct sourcing model that relies on local suppliers, Boohoo quickly evolved into one of the UK’s most prominent fast fashion houses, and its products were being sold to more than 2.3 million active customers in over 100 countries by the time it began trading on the London Stock Exchange in March 2014. As the company continued to acquire well-known brands over the following years, its market capitalization increased from GBP 560 million (USD 702 million) in March 2014 to GBP 4.5 billion (USD 5.6 billion) by the end of June 2020.
Criticisms against Boohoo started to emerge two years after the company went public. In the 2016 Australian Fashion Report, the organization Baptist World Aid Australia gave the company the worst grade for efforts to mitigate risk of worker exploitation in its supply chains. The following year, a supplier of Boohoo was the subject of an undercover investigation by Channel 4 Dispatches, which found widespread underpayment issues and serious fire risk in the garment industry in Leicester, UK. In 2017, Boohoo was named as one of several UK online retailers selling real fur products mislabeled as faux fur following an investigation by Humane Society International UK and Sky News.
Further allegations arose in 2018 and 2019, including a Financial Times article covering “dark factories” in Leicester, as well as several PETA press releases on Boohoo’s retraction of its pledge to ban wool despite animal cruelty allegations against the wool industry. In January 2019, Boohoo was ranked by the Environmental Audit Committee of the UK Parliament as “least engaged” in its commitments to reduce environmental and social impacts of its products. Five months later, the Union of Shop, Distributive and Allied Workers protested Boohoo’s alleged refusal to discuss union representation.
