Local
Local can mean a lot of different things, so it warrants elaboration. For us, local means supporting people who share our values. We will shape our decision making around these shared values, seeking partners who believe in craftsmanship, fair wages, responsible consumption and sustainability. The concept applies at an individual level, but also a national level.
Countries all have different regulations, controls, compliance and costs; wages, salaries, rents, taxes, etc. When faced with a sourcing decision that has alternatives in Germany and Vietnam, we choose Germany. Between Germany and Montreal, we choose Montreal. We opt for the family-owned workshop in Mile End over the publicly traded corporation that has a local warehouse.
Worth noting is that we believe globalization and offshoring have done amazing things for underdeveloped nations, bringing millions of people out of impoverished subsistence into the middle class. It has also improved the average standard of living for everyone across the planet.
The problem doesn’t lie with making things elsewhere. What we are concerned with is the unfair playing field, and the hidden costs that stem from differences in regulations impacting the environment, safety and worker rights, the lack of labour mobility, and differing government incentives and monetary policies. We believe that the way all these elements combine and interact, results in an unsustainable path: the concentration of wealth, wage stagnation in developed countries, and disastrous effects on the environment. This is why we believe in local.
Provenance
Our workers, the artists we chose to collaborate with, the concepts and product names we come up with all have a deep connection with Montreal, its history, its people, its art and culture. So, in this respect, we can truly say each one of our products is “FABriqué ICI”.
To provide a better idea of how little space foreign outsourcing takes in the fabrication of our products, we’ve created a simple but accurate sunburst chart depicting the percentage of all components and labour involved in the fabrication of the most complex item in our catalogue, a set of two FABICI Lenoir1001xl speakers. You can see that for the few components built overseas, we’ve made every effort to ensure the supplier was local or at least Canadian.
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