Cascale has released the Better Buying 2025 Garment Industry Scorecard, a benchmarking tool designed to track year-over-year progress in brand and retailer purchasing practices across the global apparel sector. The Scorecard is based on anonymous input from more than 1,200 suppliers collected during the 2025 Better Buying Purchasing Practices Index (BBPPI) ratings cycle and evaluates performance across seven key purchasing practice categories that directly influence suppliers’ ability to provide decent work and wages. Collectively, these suppliers represent over 10 million workers — roughly one in six of the estimated 60 million employed in the global apparel value chain.
The 2025 results reveal a slight overall decline in performance. Most category scores fell by one to two points, signalling stalled progress in improving purchasing practices. The steepest drop was recorded in the Planning and Forecasting category, which slipped from 59 to 56 points, with more than 37% of suppliers identifying it as the most critical area for improvement. The overall purchasing practices score also declined slightly, from 67 to 66.
This Scorecard is the first to be published since Better Buying became part of Cascale in February 2025. It offers top-line findings ahead of the full BBPPI Report, which will combine the Scorecard data with in-depth commentary and analysis. Companies that subscribe to Better Buying’s surveys have already received their individual scorecards, and Cascale has urged them to share these with suppliers and collaborate as equal partners to co-create solutions to the challenges identified.
Katie Hess, Head of Product at Cascale Better Buying, said the BBPPI scores provide a “critical baseline” for understanding the state of purchasing practices in the industry. She noted that while brand and retailer progress has broadly held steady despite unprecedented global and geopolitical turbulence caused by ongoing trade tariff uncertainty, “at this late stage in the game, stagnation is not good enough.” Hess stressed the “urgent need for collective, committed, whole-industry action” to improve purchasing practices.
