McCarthy's has been the leading retailer of school uniforms for over 50 years and has earned a reputation for offering its school partners and customers the best selection of high quality school uniforms. In addition to “building in” unsurpassed quality, we have also adopted corporate social responsibility as the foundation of our new mission and strategy. Our new mission is, therefore, “to create the world's highest quality school uniforms in a socially responsible way”. This purpose is now the “north star” that will guide all decision making and strategy in our organization.

We understand that achieving our new aspirations around becoming a Canadian leader in social responsibility will require a focused and lasting commitment. Becoming the kind of leader that we want to be is simply not something that will be achieved in a few months – what is required is a sustained multi-year commitment to develop and implement new social responsibility initiatives. Going forward, we will achieve this by focusing our efforts in four key areas:

R.J. McCarthy is very proud of the achievements that we have made to date in each of the four areas above. But again, we believe it is time to take all of our efforts on social responsibility to the next level and we aspire to be nothing less than our industry’s leader on social responsibility. We have set this goal for ourselves because it is the right thing to do and because we believe that, over time, our distinctive position on social responsibility will help us to grow and succeed as an organization.

Many projects in our organization are now running at full speed to begin to advance this exciting new agenda and I look forward to sharing our future conclusions and achievements on this important topic with all of our constituents.