Walking into the Disney Store at Disney Springs or strolling through the shops in Main Street USA, it’s easy to be overwhelmed by the sheer amount of Disney merchandise that is on the shelves. But where does all of that stuff come from? Who, exactly, makes all those mouse ear hats, those plush toys, and all of that apparel? Well… thanks to a website called Import Yeti, we’re able to now find out.
The website uses shipping container tracking to determine what big companies are having shipped across the world, as well as where those containers come from. I wouldn’t be surprised if the website is either shut down or procedures occur to make its data unavailable… once people learn of this site in mass, anybody can go check out who is supplying Nike, Apple, etc. Companies that are using less than ethical means to source their items could quickly be outed. Frankly, I think it’s a wonderful thing, and I wish there was an easy way to track which companies are using forced labor, child labor, etc. I’d love to not buy their products.
So back to Disney, let’s take a look at the top ten suppliers they use for their Disney Theme Park Merchandise:
By far, the top company Disney works with for keeping up merchandise is OOCL Logistics China. The company acquires items from other Asian companies and then ships them across the world. Located in Shanghai, Disney appears to be the biggest customer for OOCL Logistics China by far. Unfortunately, OOCL Logistics China makes it difficult for us to see where Disney’s supplies are coming from as they’re being lumped in with OOCL Logistics rather than us getting a read out of all the companies making the stuff loaded on OOCL container ships.
Next up is Dream Plastics of Vietnam. This is a huge toy manufacturer, so there’s not much of a surprise that Disney is using them for their stuff.
Number three and number four belong to more OOCL Logistics shipping companies, one located in Taiwan and one located in Thailand. Again, this hides much of what we’d like to see in regards to where the items are actually being made.
Chengteh Chinaware Thailand is another big supplier for Disney theme parks. To the best of my knowledge, this is a good company with acceptable labor conditions and over 4,000 employees. You can find that they were listed in Disney’s 2018 Facility List, so clearly they’re happy with this company being transparently known as a supplier.
Rounding out the rest of the top ten are Karsten S A (Brazilian manufacturer of fabric items), Bay Island Sportswear (a Honduran clothing factory I’d like to do some more research into), Vietnamese plush toy company Minh Thanh Export Garments, the Chinese toy glove company International Toy, and Langgeng Buana Jaya Jl Veteran Madya, which is an Indonesian toy company.
There is definitely more to dig into with these revelations. This is just the cusp of the iceberg. Part of what we’re checking for in these suppliers is to make sure that Disney is doing better than in 2011 when it was found that one of their third party factories was using child labor and forced overtime.
Disney, Mattel and Wal-mart toy-maker accused of child labour
However, I’m hopeful that Disney’s oversight has greatly improved, and thus far I don’t see any major suppliers in the top ten that are implementing horrible work conditions. Are these suppliers the very best places to be employed? Probably not, but what I’m looking for are things like child labor, forced labor, slavery, forced overtime, physical coercion, etc. So far, so good for The Walt Disney Company in 2022.
I’ll keep looking into this issue over time. I don’t see a good way for us to condemn slavery in the past if we fail to condemn slavery in the present. Words aren’t nearly as powerful as actually looking into where our items come from.
Feel free to start doing your own research and let me know what you find in the comments below. Who knows… maybe you’ll break the next big discovery? In the meantime, let’s give kudos to Disney that their top suppliers seem to be above board when it comes to using forced labor and child labor.
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