What gets measured: the audit framework we wrote for our factories.

We publish all our factory scores. Here's the 47-point rubric behind them, and why we made it public.

Why we wrote our own

The audit industry has a dirty open secret: certificates are products. A factory can buy a passing social-compliance audit the way it buys thread — schedule it, prepare for it, frame it for the lobby wall. After the second time a fully certified supplier surprised us (once on unauthorized subcontracting, once on a fire exit that existed only on the floor plan), we stopped outsourcing our judgment and wrote a rubric of our own. It has 47 points because that's where it landed honestly — not a rounder number picked for marketing.

What the 47 points cover

The rubric breaks into five blocks. Labor and hours (14 points): wage records cross-checked against production output — not just payroll, because payroll lies and sewing tickets don't — overtime patterns, age verification, freedom-of-movement basics, and turnover rate, which we treat as workers voting with their feet. Safety (11 points): exits walked and timed, extinguisher dates, needle-guard compliance, chemical storage, and whether the person on the cutting floor can say what the evacuation plan is without looking at a poster. Quality systems (9 points): golden-sample control, inline inspection records, calibration of measurement tools, and how defects travel — a factory that can show you last month's defect log unprompted is a factory that measures things when nobody's visiting. Environment (7 points): energy and water data (now feeding our lifecycle assessment), wastewater handling where dye or wash processes exist, and waste-stream segregation. Transparency (6 points): the block that does the most work — subcontracting disclosure, document consistency across visits, and whether unannounced visits are contractually accepted and practically welcomed.

Scoring is deliberately blunt: each point is met, partially met, or not met. No weighted decimals, no algorithmic mystique. A 41/47 means something a 87.3% never could, because anyone can look up which six points were missed.

Why publish it

Publishing the scores — every factory, every audit cycle, including the uncomfortable ones — was argued about internally for months. The case against was obvious: we'd be handing competitors our supplier map and admitting our partners' flaws in public. The case for won on three grounds. First, secrecy is the soil bad audits grow in; a rubric that fears daylight isn't a rubric, it's PR. Second, it changed factory behavior faster than any contract clause ever has — owners compare scores, and nobody wants to be the published 33. Third, it forces discipline on us: when a factory we like scores poorly, the public number takes away the quiet option of looking elsewhere for a quarter and hoping.

The predicted disaster never arrived. No factory walked away over publication. Two raised their scores by double digits inside a year, and one now prints its Backper score in its own sales materials — which we find funny and also exactly the point.

What gets measured

The rubric's name comes from the oldest line in management — what gets measured gets managed — but the version we've come to believe is sharper: what gets measured in public gets fixed. A factory score kept in a drawer is information. A factory score on a website is an incentive. The 47 points are just the instrument; publication is the music.

The full rubric is available to any buyer who asks, including our competitors. Audits improve the industry fastest when nobody owns the questions.

Related reading: For the pre-shipment inspection checklist we run on every production run using this same rigor, see our Wholesale guide Wholesale Backpack Quality Control.