The Kno founder is helping to build a more equitable workplace for factory workers—while also making businesses more profitable—but has met with her own share of unfair treatment in the process
“You can’t understand someone until you’ve walked a mile in their shoes,” goes the ancient Native American proverb, but how about understanding someone only after you’ve joined them sewing waistbands into 2,000 pairs of sweatpants? On her quest to improve the lives of garment workers in Asia with her company Kno, 2022 Gen.T honouree Marianne Hughes first joined them on the factory floor.
“Kno is about figuring out who actually makes our products, whether they’re in safe conditions and what their life is like. That’s the question I started with as a consumer,” Hughes says.
The 2013 Rana Plaza factory collapse in Bangladesh, which killed 1,134 in the deadliest garment industry disaster in history, was the catalyst that would lead to Hughes dedicating her career to ensuring that the workers who make the products most people take for granted are never forgotten or imperilled again.
Hughes, who was at university in the UK at the time, began a period of research and journalistic writing that lay the foundations for her company Kno, a data platform which creates a feedback loop between factory owners and their employees and brands and consumers to build a more equitable workplace that also ticks boxes for business owners. In 2013, while studying for her business management degree, she embarked on an exchange programme to Hong Kong, where she says she “became more aware of consumption and the very scary place it was going”. She began interning at Redress, the Hong Kong NGO founded by Christina Dean in 2007 to reduce waste in the fashion industry, and was inspired by how Dean, a former dentist, had set out to tackle a problem she had spotted and couldn’t turn away from. Hughes herself saw a gap in the market in addressing what she terms “the social aspect” of fashion.
“Quite a lot has been done on the environmental side, but [even now] we are one of the only solution providers or startups in this space,” she says.
Hughes set up Kno, formerly Kno Global, in 2018, with the goal of bringing greater transparency to supply chains by engaging stakeholders in the manufacturing sphere and improving worker engagement. As well as securing investment from ethical venture capital firm SOSV, it was the first company to receive grant funding from the UK government’s Modern Slavery Act fund.
Hughes, who is British and based in Hong Kong, says she wouldn’t have been able to overcome challenges, like building trust with workers and their employers, if she hadn’t experienced life in a factory for herself. At an event, she met a factory owner, who gave her the initial funding needed for her to focus on her enterprise full-time. As a result, she spent time in a garment factory in China to see how things worked and learn about workers’ lives, which involved a stint on the sewing machine.
“It taught me just how similar factories are to every workplace in the world. We’re all looking for the same things: for pay, of course, but also a relationship. The top reason any of us leave or stay in our job is because of the people—either we don’t like the boss, we don’t get on with the colleagues, we feel alone, or we find out our friends are somewhere else and we want to go work with them too. I thought, how can we use those aspects to just make the workplace even more efficient?”
Kno’s model builds trust with factory workers, who give anonymous feedback on metrics like their wellbeing and mental health, creating a data field that is shared with the factory so that action can be taken on any issues. Then the overall report is shared with brands so that they can confirm that their products are being made in an environment where workers’ needs are respected and acted upon. The benefits are manifold: workers are able to find resolutions to any issues they face without fear of retaliation through being identified, while businesses see improvements in retention and productivity, boosting their bottom lines. Consistent data showing increased profit margins is the most important deciding factor for companies to bring Kno onto the factory floor, which is why Hughes would rather be framed as business-friendly rather than charitable. “The only thing that will drive factories to treat their workers properly is if it increases profits, so that’s the only thing that will create change,” she says. “People hear about me doing something with factory workers, and say, ‘Oh, that’s a nice thing to do, isn’t it?’ As if we’re a charity or exist just to make [brands] look good. I’m always trying to get away from that perspective, and just trying to communicate that, actually, this is a big moneymaker. It’s a big problem-solver. It’s a big avoidance of risk, it’s a big thing tied to your bottom line, your profit.”
