But what is a B Corp?
To use the official line, “Certified B Corporations, or B Corps, are companies verified by B Lab to meet high standards of social and environmental performance, transparency, and accountability.”
The drive behind the B Corp movement is to use business as a force for good, and from our very earliest days, this has been what Cleanery has been all about – business as a force for good. It was, therefore, a no brainer to make it our goal to certify as a B Corp.
Worldwide there are now over 6000 certified B Corps, across 80 countries, and we couldn’t be more pleased to be joining their ranks as changemakers working for good.
Mark Sorensen and Ellie Brade - Cleanery Co-Founders
How do you become a B Corp?
To become a certified B Corp, companies must complete a detailed assessment, examining every aspect of business, across five impact areas: community, customers, environment, governance and workers. Certified B Corps must then undergo re-certification every three years.
You can read our B Corp assessment here.
Cleanery’s Journey to B Corp Certification
After several years of research and development, Cleanery began selling its products in September 2021 and started the journey to B Corp certification shortly afterwards.
The B Corp certification process intricately examines every facet of business, which allowed us to structure ourselves in the best possible way. While there were so many good things we were already doing prior to certification, the B Corp assessment really helped us to cement and formalise our processes, frameworks, and way of doing business.
There are many things that we were doing that go above and beyond standard business practice, which contributed to our certification. These include:
- Becoming a registered Living Wage Employer
- Development of our proprietary low-waste, low-emissions factory, where we manufacture our product range ourselves.
- Becoming carbon positive (offsetting to scope 1,2 and 3)
- Incredibly high standards of customer stewardship (we love our customers!)
- Looking after our team, contributing to charity, and doing our best to be good humans!
Achieving B Corp certification has been a super important milestone in our business journey, and a great starting point for us to only keep improving and doing better.
Looking Forwards
This is just the start. We have big targets to keep improving and implementing new practices to be the best we can be. This will include detailed carbon reporting and impact reports. We are not resting on our laurels and have an ambitious plan to keep doing business for good, at the highest standards.
We are on a mission to be the company that converts everyone to sustainable cleaning and personal care products. Our end goal is to eliminate the unnecessary packaging, emissions, and waste in the cleaning and personal care aisles, and to do this we have completely reimagined the way these products are made and used.
The Cleanery team
We are proud to be bold and ambitious and to be playing our part in helping everyone make the small changes to their everyday life today, that will have a big impact on our beautiful planet tomorrow.
Thanks for being part of our journey.