Supply Chain Foundations: dignity for the people  behind your product

You're about to sign your first factory, contract manufacturer, research partner, or offshore team — or place your first big purchase order. How people are treated inside your supply chain is easiest to decide right now, while there's nothing to fix. 

Foundations is a fixed-scope legal engagement that builds labor standards into your supply chain from the first handshake, so you never have to retrofit them later.

Who this is for. Companies roughly Seed through Series A, approaching their first major supplier relationship, usually before there’s a supply-chain hire, CSR department, or in-house global employment lawyer. I work across tech, fintech and SaaS; healthtech, pharma and research; professional services; and DTC, manufacturing, and consumer goods. If you already have a supply chain that needs fixing, that's different work; ask me about it.

How it Works

Risk Analysis:

Before anything else: where the risk actually lives in what you make or buy. Your product, inputs, and geographies each carry known labor risks — some famous, some not (everyone's heard about the cotton; almost nobody asks about the shipping). You get a map of your footprint's risk concentrations, which sets the priorities for everything that follows.

Supplier Selection

Before you commit: how to vet the suppliers on your shortlist for how they treat workers: what to ask, which documents mean something, what's theater. You get a screening protocol you can rerun on every future supplier, plus my read on your current shortlist.

Policy Commitments

Whether they stay in-house or go on your website, you get a package of policies on the key issues (living wage, child labor, forced labor, unions, classification, and more) tailored to your company's values and mapped to your risk profile from Part 1.

Contract Architecture

You're trusting another company with your name; the contract is where that trust gets structure. You get a contract package ready for your first negotiation.

Responsibility Structure

Someone at your company has to own this as you grow; that part isn't outsourceable. We decide who owns what, what gets reviewed on what cadence, and what happens the first time something looks wrong. You get a short playbook your team can run without me.

Ongoing Monitoring

Optional add-on, after the engagement. The playbook says what to check and when. If you don't yet have the hands to run it, I run it: the quarterly checks, per supplier, until you do.

What this isn't:

Not an audit, not a certification, not a seal for your website. I won't call your supply chain ethical — a snapshot can't tell you that. What I build is the system that catches problems early and handles them well, so integrity is part of how you do business.

Cost and shape:

Fixed fee engagement for the package, delivered over a 12-week engagement. Add-ons for additional supplier categories, contract negotiation support, and ongoing monitoring.

Who I am:

I'm Halima Woodhead. I spent more than a decade inside the full system of labor compliance — enforcement, diplomacy, civil society engagement, and technical assistance to governments, companies, and workers across countries and sectors before I began advising companies directly.

At the U.S. Department of Labor's Bureau of International Labor Affairs, I advised on the labor provisions of U.S. free trade agreements and assessed whether foreign governments were meeting their international labor obligations. That work put me in the room with companies, unions, NGOs, and government officials on the same disputes — and in direct conversation with more than a thousand workers. I watched the same situations from every angle at once.

What I kept seeing was the gap between what companies document and what workers actually experience. Usually nobody was lying. The documents were built to satisfy an audit, and the systems underneath them were built late; after the supply chain already existed, when every fix meant reopening a negotiation someone had already won.

Foundations is aimed at the one moment when the fix is still cheap: before the relationships are signed.

My practice is global, and I work exclusively for employers — specifically the ones building something they can stand behind.