Superdry

We set up a Diversity & Inclusion Employee Group, which has members from all over the business (Retail, Head Office, Europe, UK, US, Entry roles to Senior Leadership) representing different voices within Superdry. Together we gather feedback around ED&I, we discuss ideas, drive engagement, and take action. We meet once a month to discuss updates and progress. We opened up a virtual D&I Comment Box, so everyone can get in touch with the group: Diversity and Inclusion is an ongoing conversation and everybody is invited to join the talk. We are very proud to have an executive sponsor with us to support the group alongside their journey. Our slogan? We are all Superdry.

The Growing Futures Programme provides support for candidates from ethnic minority backgrounds who are offered a job at our Cheltenham Head Office, if there are financial obstacles that would deter them from taking up a role. Diversity and Inclusion is a fundamental pillar for Superdry. It's not something we just say off the cuff - we underline it with action and commitment. We want to attract the best people, and we don’t want financial obstacles to be a barrier to embarking on a career with us. Not everything can be fixed with financial support, but the Growing Futures Programme is one out of many D&I initiatives that we are engaged in at Superdry, and we believe this is a significant step to enable us to draw from the widest pool of talent for the roles we are looking to fill. Find out more here: https://careers.superdry.com/about-us/diversity-and-inclusion.

Collecting Diversity Data is important to understand who we are. How diverse is Superdry? If we know where we are right now, we can understand where we should focus next and set clear targets around how we want to change. And we need measurable data to ensure that we can monitor and report on our progress and targets transparently. So we starting gathering diversity data from our employees, applicants (in the UK) and new hires. We are collecting and processing the data in accordance with our privacy notice, submitting data is optional and can be revoked any time. We transparently share this data with the whole business in our quarterly ED&I Reports.

The whole Senior Leadership Team took part in an unconscious bias training last year. We want to ensure that people learn about their implicit biases and adjust their automatic pattern of thinking to then rethink their behaviours. We started this journey with the leadership team in order for them to be role models and to teach their teams, but we will continue DE&I Trainings across the business, see commitment 1.

With the launch of our new virtual talent development platform at the end of this year we will also launch more training around ED&I. While we already have unconscious bias trainings in place, we need to roll this out to every hiring manager in the business and give access to optional training to everyone.

Kicking off MOBOLISE is part of a bigger picture: Talking to schools, communities, setting up events and building partnerships to support young black talent in starting a career at Superdry will be a focus for us for the years to come. We Attracting talent and having a fair hiring process will support us in achieving our leadership diversity targets. In order to create a fair hiring process we introduced anonymised applications, which means that any data that could give hint of someone’s background, like name or age is anonymised. We also started requested balanced pool of talent from our agencies when ever they support us in filling a role.

In order to improve diversity at Superdry we set ourselves targets for the representation in our Leadership Teams: Our Board, Our Executive Team and our Senior Leadership Team (Heads of and their direct reports). Our Board and our Executive Team will have female representation of 33%. Our Senior Leadership Team will consist of 50% women. In all teams we will have 14% Leaders with ethnic minority backgrounds. In order to achieve these targets we need to look at our hiring process and our progression, see Commitment 2.

Together with our amazing D&I Employee Group we are currently working on rolling out a lot of communication mainly about story telling and education. Focussing on keeping the dialogue around diversity and inclusion going is so important to make small and bigger changes across the whole business and different departments. Next to education materials that we’re rolling out this summer, our next big celebration is Black History Month in October. We’re currently working on several projects to make this month a special one at Superdry.