Our Culture
The idea of corporate social responsibility is not new to our company. Since our early beginnings as a single shoe store based in Seattle, we have made every effort to run an ethical business where people want to work and shop. We believe it's just good business. Our social responsibility efforts help us connect with our customers and employees and help drive results. Just as we strive to offer our customers the best possible customer service, social responsibility is a subject that requires continuous improvement — it's something that we can always get better at.
Our Strategy
We recognize any success we've enjoyed is based on the quality of our relationships with our customers, employees, vendors and communities. We strive to be a socially responsible company and know that the trust our customers have in us is not to be taken lightly. Making responsible business decisions is something we've done for a long time. Nordstrom was one of the first retail companies to offer profit sharing to its employees in 1952, and each year we donate millions of dollars to nonprofit partners across the country. We were also the first among our direct peers in fashion-specialty retail to print on Forest Stewardship Council (FSC)-certified paper with 30 percent recycled content. However, until recently, all the various efforts were never organized under a company plan. Our mindset was just to do the right thing and we had lots of great employees individually making decisions to improve our social responsibility efforts.
In 2007, we recognized the need to centralize our existing efforts and created a multi-divisional group of leaders to come up with a comprehensive social responsibility strategy. To guide our strategy, we talked to our employees and some of our best customers to learn more about what's most important to them when it comes to social responsibility. Based on this feedback, we've decided to focus on the following areas as they relate to our business: Supporting Communities, Sustaining the Environment, Protecting Human Rights, and Caring for our People. Through this strategy, we hope to develop stronger relationships with our customers and be a better global steward.
We would like to take an opportunity to share a little more about our efforts in these categories:
We would also like to share the progress we've made in these four categories: