Transparency
How we make money
We rate brands and we earn money from some of them. Both of those things are true, and pretending otherwise would undermine the only thing we’re selling, which is that our ratings mean something. So here is exactly how it works.
Effective 22 October 2026
Affiliate commission
Some links from our Shop and product pages to retailers are affiliate links, through the Awin network. If you click one and buy something, we may receive a commission, typically between 5% and 15% of the order, from the retailer or the network.
It costs you nothing. The price you pay is identical whether you reach the retailer through us or type their address directly.
Every affiliate link carries an Ad label where you see it: on the “Shop at” button itself, and beside the title of the Shop page, where every outbound link is one. Each is marked up with rel="sponsored", and the footer of every page says how we are paid. A clear label at the point of the link, rather than a note you have to go looking for, is what the Competition and Markets Authority and the ASA expect, and it’s what we’d want as readers.
Verification fees
Brands that meet our standard can license the Good badge for an annual fee. That fee pays for the audit: the consultant’s time, the evidence review, the annual re-check.
It does not buy the outcome. A brand that pays for an audit and fails it has bought an audit, not a badge, and the fee doesn’t come back as a better score. The rubric is applied identically to brands that pay and brands we assess unprompted from public information.
Sponsored content
We may occasionally publish sponsored features. Where we do, they carry a clear "Sponsored" label at the top, they never appear in ratings or rankings, and a brand cannot buy its way into a buying guide.
Why we think this holds up
Disclosure alone is weak protection, because every affiliate site discloses, and plenty still rank whoever pays most. Two structural things matter more:
- The rating is computed, not decided. Scores come from a published rubric applied to evidence, not from an editor’s judgement about who to feature. You can read the entire method on our standard page and check our working.
- Brands we earn nothing from are rated the same way. Our catalogue includes brands with no affiliate programme and no verification fee. Some of them score higher than brands that pay us.
If you ever see something on this site that looks like commercial influence on a rating, please email hello@fashionwithoutcruelty.co.uk and tell us. We’d rather hear it from you than not hear it at all.
Current status
We are a publisher on the Awin affiliate network. Every brand in our Shop is an Awin advertiser we have joined, and every outbound link in the Shop, and every “Shop at” button on a product page from one of those brands, can earn us commission. Brands in FWC Edit and on our Brands page that are not in the Shop earn us nothing, and their “Visit the brand” links carry no label because they are not adverts.