It’s B Corp Month! Here’s why that matters

 Vivobarefoot is proud to be a certified B Corp business. Our B Corp status is an important part of our mission to become truly regenerative, guiding us towards continuous improvement. B Corp companies must recertify every three years, and we just received our latest score. 
 
This March is B Corp Month. To celebrate, this blog explains why B Corp matters, why our new score is only a small part of the story, and what our B Corp future holds.

B Lab is an organisation working to turn business into a force for good: by certifying impactful businesses, and by building more inclusive, equitable, regenerative economic systems. 
 
B Lab’s certification framework – called the B Corp framework – measures companies’ social and environmental impact. If a company demonstrates sufficient social and environmental performance, a legal commitment to accountable governance (to ensure the company operates ethically and in the best interests of everybody involved), and the transparency required for assessment, they can become a certified B Corp. Their B Corp score – rated out of a maximum 200 points, with 80 as a minimum entry score - is based on their framework performance.

By independently scrutinising our performance, the folks at B Corp help keep us accountable. The framework helps us identify areas for improvement. The B Corp community plugs us into a network buzzing with the passion, knowledge, and collaboration needed to build regenerative business systems. And because B Corp is respected and recognised globally, certification makes it easier for Vivobarefoot customers to recognise that we’re working towards independently verified best practice in terms of social and environmental performance, and responsible governance.

 That said, we are happy with how far we’ve travelled. In 2020 we became a B Corp with a score of 98.8. This January, we recertified with an increased score of 119.3.
 
This is a significant rise, built on improvement across all five areas of the B Corp framework: Governance, Workers, Community, Environment, and Customers.

• Environment saw our largest improvement, driven by improvements in our resource conservation, water usage, and impact on air and climate. 
• Our Workers score also jumped, thanks to improved health and wellness benefits, safety procedures, and staff feeling more engaged and satisfied.
• Our Community score increased with hard (and very much unfinished) work to build a transparent value chain.
• Our Customers score grew thanks to expanded health and wellness products, services, and experiences.
• Finally, our Governance score (our internal processes and policies), which was already close to maximum, stayed about the same, keeping us as accountable as ever.

Our new B Corp score is a sign that we’re moving in the right direction. We’re proud of the dedicated work across Vivobarefoot that made it possible. But we’re mostly focused on the journey ahead.
 
“It has been a pleasure managing the cross-functional effort to prepare for our recertification,” says Connor Tracy, who leads our B Corp work as part of the Regeneration team. “Our ‘B Champs’ across the company have risen to the challenge to improve how we work and evidence that work. Over three years they have been adding documents and preparing for self-assessments, mock verifications, and this official recertification. I’m delighted with the recertification score, and excited to embed the B Corp framework deeper into Vivobarefoot, so our high standards and targets become job-role expectations.”
 
It’s essential to remember that better is not the same as regenerative. Far from it. ‘Better’ can still be unsustainable.

B Corp recertification doesn’t change our mission: to create footwear and experiences that are regenerative to human health and the environment. But it does sharpen our focus on some priority goals by the time we recertify again, in 2027:

• Integrate B Corp responsibilities into job descriptions, so B Corp metrics are baked into performance, and Vivo staff feel empowered to make changes in their own areas.
• Ensure that our value chain is as transparent as possible, allowing us to provide customers with more detailed environmental assessments of every Vivo product.
• Develop longer partnerships, and more beneficial trading terms for underserved partners.
• Increase the time Vivo staff spend volunteering on impact projects.

These goals are all in service of our longer-term North Star goals: to design all products for circularity, eliminate all non-regenerative virgin materials, ensure 100% value-chain transparency, certify all products to best-practice standards, source all natural materials from regenerative sources, and use bio-based materials over synthetics where possible. Only by meeting these goals can we achieve true regenerative impact for all products we manufacture.

Not everything will work along the way; that’s inevitable when creating new ways of working. But in the words of our Chief Ecosystem Officer, Galahad: “success is failing, but not losing any enthusiasm.

B Corp provides a map for moving towards a better, bolder business future for people, planet, and profit – a map we share with others.
 
Continuing to navigate well requires togetherness within Vivo, collaboration with B Corp, and cooperation and mutual learning with other businesses – whether they’re in totally different industries or our footwear ‘competitors’.
 
Ultimately, prioritising regeneration as much as profit is our biggest business challenge. We hope that we can rise to that challenge, and that you’ll let us know when we fall short.
 
Happy #BCorpMonth!