Oxfam to stop using Fairtrade label
Howard Lake | 19 January 2003 | News
Oxfam’s pioneering Fairtrade brand, developed in the 1960s, is to be scrapped due to “commercial reasons.”
The idea of selling products sourced from developing countries while paying their creators a fair price saw Oxfam offering around 1,700 Fairtrade items in the mid-1990s. However, the proliferation of loyalty cards and supermarket deals meant that price rather than ethics was still a dominant concern for many. On the other hand, the success of ethical brands such as the Co-op and the Body Shop, together with other charities selling fairtrade items, demonstrate that the Fairtrade movement has grown considerably and changed. It could be argued that Oxfam’s Fairtrade brand was no longer required.
The decision to drop the Fairtrade brand followed a review of the charity’s fair trading operation in 2002. As a result the charity’s trading arm started withdrawing its Fairtrade products from its 400 shops at the end of 2002.
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Read “Oxfam bows to market and scraps Fairtrade brand” by Mark Townsend in The Observer.
About Howard Lake
Howard Lake is consultant editor of UK Fundraising. He founded the site in 1994 and successfully sold it in 2022. As director of Giving X Ltd he is exploring growing giving on a massive scale.
He is the founder of Fundraising Camp and co-founder of GoodJobs.