Joining The B Corp Community
We can’t individually shop or lifestyle-hack our way out of climate change, or the global legacies of race, class, and sexual inequality. But there are collective efforts afoot in each of our own backyards that we can plug ourselves into.
Ikaria Design has always been a product of multiple communities coming together to envision a sustainable solution. Healthy change has always been this way. Rugged-individual-bootstrap thinking has always been a myth foisted to undermine the power we have when we come together with shared vision.
This is why we’re so proud to have been included in the B Corp community of Benefit Corporations. Why would a company have to differentiate themselves this way? Surprisingly, It’s easy for a modern corporation to drift into putting the interests of stockholders and other investors first in line before people, or the planet. B Corp members sign a declaration of interdependence and commit to a rigorous and recurring assessment process in order to ensure they place people and planet ahead of profits. Without community, it’s easy for a soulless corporation to spin away from stated values, chasing purposeless growth. We know we can only be as good as the communities we are committed to. When you look for the B Corp logo, it tells you a lot about who is influencing the decisions made. That company has agreed to be accountable to a large and growing cohort of organizations, eager to prove to the world that we can live out our care for our lovely planet as we work to support our families.
There are two ways I’ve been taking advantage of the B Lab site. I go there when I’m looking for partners, suppliers, vendors that we can collaborate with when developing a new product, or looking for a social enterprise to direct our charitable contributions to. The other value to me is as a source of inspiration and fresh ideas for deepening our participation in the circular economy.
If you go to the B Corp site here and type in an industry or product keyword, you’ll be presented with numerous examples of already viable businesses that align with your values. For example, if you're concerned about fast fashion and its damaging effects on labor laws and you’ve also recently learned about the right to repair movement, you’ll be pleased to find Sojo. They are addressing both issues simultaneously. They provide services to repair well made clothing and collaborate with brands beyond their own to bring back a culture of durable quality.
Corporations themselves, though they have the odd situation of being legal persons, clearly don’t have souls. If we want to continue be pro-social as a business, we need to continually align ourselves with communities of accountability. That’s why we’re thrilled that we’ve passed the bar to be among the community of Benefit Corporations.
I can report that the process of becoming a B Corp member is rigorous. It’s been just under 5 years since we began the process, and it doesn’t just stop with being able to display the B Corp logo. We are now even more capable of producing products in collaboration with other similarly committed companies. I was delighted to discover the number of B Corp certified furniture manufacturers, fabric manufacturers, metal shops, software developers, and financial institutions. Nearly everything that goes into producing Soul Seats and providing quality service to our customers has a respective B Corp organization we can learn from and work with.
We are also looking forward to learning more about the concept of vendor education. There’s a whole discipline devoted to helping manufacturers like us educate and support the vendors and suppliers that help produce our products to discover the value of pro-social, pro-environmental policies for the long term viability of their enterprise.
Do you know of companies or organizations whose values and vision align with ours? Please make an introduction. We know that the B Corp community doesn’t include everyone. The more the merrier.
