Sustainability

To be a B Corp is a commitment to using your business as a force for good through benefitting your stakeholders that could be your customers, your workers – or the farmers who supply their product to you. It means that you’ve engineered your company in such a way that responsibility is now a core pillar as well as legal commitment to do better and serve your stakeholders.

Strictly speaking, being a B Corp means that you have been able to prove that you are doing good throughout your business and have accumulated more than 80 points by answering approximately 250 questions related to the 5 pillars that make up the B Impact Assessment:

Governance (responsible leadership, structures, procedures, etc.)

Environment (management of environmental efforts, air, water and climate efforts, etc.)

Workers (financial security, health and wellness, safety, etc.)

Communities (diversity equity & inclusion, supply chain management, civic engagement and donations, etc.)

Customers (managing product impacts, data usage and privacy, quaity assurance, feedback, etc.)

Going through the process of becoming a B Corp you are exposed to all the things you could be doing better. That’s why for Rudolph Care becoming a B Corp is the starting point of an interesting and fascinating journey of becoming more aware and improve our business; be it through working on improving our social impact or our environmental impact.

What makes Rudolph Care’s B Corp certification different from the others?

There’s multiple versions of the B Impact Assessment based on what industry you are in. For retail, which is our industry, the most essential is using our business model for creating positive impact for stakeholders.

As we look into creating impact through our business model, Rudolph Care has a recognized impact by only using ingredients that don’t contain harmful substances – and that’s just one example!

When we tie our positive impact to our revenue stream and business model, we ensure that responsibility isn’t just an add-on in our corporation – but a recurring and ever-present positive asset.

You mentioned earlier that B Corp was a starting point. What is next for Rudolph Care’s work with B Corp?

Well, every third year you must recertify your company by going through the B Impact Assessment again. We are currently in this process with a goal of improving our score of 88,9 to 100 – at least! We are, amongst other things, trying to become recognized for supporting nature and wildlife preservation by using natural ingredients with respect to biodiversity. We’d like to retain our recognition of less toxic products, however we were founded from a place of health and wellness – so it’s only natural that we aim to become recognized as having health and wellness as a positive impact for our customers. Besides that, we’ve made a number of improvements around environmental management, reports outlining our efforts and impact, incorporated social and environmental performance indicators – as well as having established procedures such as a whistleblower policy. This is, of course, just some of the improvements we’ve made over the past 3 years, and we are looking forward to improving even further the coming years.

Can you explain the process of becoming a B Corp?

Sure! You start by establishing a baseline in the B Impact Assessment which is free to use. The average company will achieve around 50 points and will therefore have to make some improvements in order to submit for verification.

In order to submit you have to make legal commitment by updating your articles of association in order to include that you promise to serve your stakeholders as opposed to only serving your shareholders. Then you have to ensure that you actually qualify to become a B Corp – for example, don’t profit from illicit actions such as child labor, etc.

Then you will go into the verification queue, then the evaluation queue – and then you will be asked to provide evidence for any questions rewarding more than 1 point, which is an extensive undertaking. One of the key takeaways is that there’s a great difference between thinking you’re doing good and being able to prove it.

Then once you’ve undergone all these steps you will have become a Certified B Corporation by the B Lab.

B Beauty Coalition – what’s that?

Rudolph Care was one of the founding companies alongside 26 leading B Corp certified companies, such as Davines, Skandinavisk, Dr Bronners, The Body Shop, and Rituals, of an initiative called the B Beauty Coalition. This coalition is aspiring to share the hard-earned knowledge of best practices related to greener logistics, packaging, and ingredients. Basically, the B Beauty Coalition aims to guide other beauty brands to avoid some of the pitfalls that we’ve undergone along our journey as a responsible business.

Since founding the coalition, it has grown over 3 times in size!

One of The Coalition’s outputs has been this navigator tool which helps beauty companies and beauty shoppers make more informed sustainability-oriented choices – check it out! https://www.bcorpbeauty.org/b-beauty-navigator/