We’re incredibly proud to announce that Joanie Clothing is a Certified B Corporation! To celebrate this momentous achievement, we sat down with our Brand Director, Lucy, to learn more about B Corp and what this certification means for our future.

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Being crowned a B Corp is an accolade of monumental proportions. It's a certification of Joanie's social and environmental performance, public transparency, and legal accountability: a commitment to balance profits with purpose. 

We’ve been working hard behind the scenes for almost two years to make this happen, and we’re so excited to finally share this incredible news with you, our Joanie Gals!

Hi Lucy! Can you tell us a bit more about why you wanted Joanie to certify as a B Corp?

I remember, clear as a bell, the first email I typed out re: B Corp. In October 2021, fresh out of Covid lockdown and after months of working from home using the ‘extra time’ we suddenly found on our hands to take a deep dive (as the marketeers might say) - it was time to scrutinise the running of our own business and our own behaviours. Now was our chance to stop, reset, and improve: to take a forward-thinking, more conscious outlook toward the products we create and the brand we run. 

Having already re-sourced most of our fabrics, rewritten our sustainability goals, and reset all our ethical standards, what came next? The answer was an article I had read about B Corp. 

‘It’d be the dream to get to this level,’ I typed. The reply came, ‘That’s a very admirable goal indeed, but becoming a Certified B Corp is just about the toughest environmental, ethical and social status you can get to. There aren’t all that many retailers that have achieved it.’ My response: ‘Aim, believe, achieve.’

What makes Joanie a B Corporation and how are you doing business differently?

A slightly dusty businessman once told me that the most expensive phrase in business is ‘because we’ve always done it that way,’ and that really stuck with me. Why carry on doing things the way you always have, just because it's easier? Reset your own brain and disrupt the system - you can always do better, but only if you bother to. 

B Corp is about just that, being bothered. It shows your team, your shareholders, your customers and, ultimately, the world exactly what you stand for. It’s about choosing a better way of working or doing or buying or rewarding. 

It's not an easy certification to get, and for good reason. It shows our customers that we are able to meet the highest verified standards of social and environmental performance, public transparency and legal accountability and with that comes trust and credibility.

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What challenges did you overcome when applying for B Corp Certification? What have you learned on your journey towards becoming a more sustainable business?

B Corp balances profits with priorities. One of their suggestions is to add a couple of extra chairs to the table during meetings, one for the environment and one for society. Now, our office chairs came out of a skip - a lifelong ambition of mine is to never to leave a skip empty handed - with the mantra 'reduce, reuse, recycle' never far from our minds. 

Figuratively speaking, the chairs represent those entities having a seat at the table in every decision you make within your business. Questioning everything is the key. Can we do this? Yes! What would we need to change in order to proceed? What would we need to overcome to reach the best in class standard? 

Well, the questions are many, and they tend to start more conversations that lead to many more questions, but with patience, research, and tenacity, you can create change. The greatest learning for us as a business was that by inspiring our team, instilling an enthusiasm for the project, and working collectively, the job in hand became smaller - a problem shared is indeed a problem halved!

I’m so proud of the strides our team has taken this year. For a smaller business, we have such grand plans, and no matter how big the ideas are, the team is always up for the challenge.

Do you have any goals for the future or areas of the business where you’d like to improve?

The commitment to B Corp puts sustainability and ethics at the heart of every single decision we make. We now have an internal committee with stakeholders from each area of our business involved and educated on how they can overlay the principals of B Corp into their everyday tasks.

It is not something we have achieved and are finished with - it never will be finished, and each and every improvement we make contributes to the bigger picture. There are still many challenges ahead, and many more mountains to climb. 

We’ve been busy working behind the scenes gathering data: water usage, energy usage, chemical usage, certificates galore, but our next steps are to use that data to create meaningful targets for reduction. We want to work closely with our suppliers to drive change in their businesses and their supply chains and to work with and learn from our new wider B Corp community to create and inspire change, to protect our people and love our planet - that's our B-all and end all! 

In the words of another great ‘B’: “We've got the world and all its charms, and when the world is through with us, we've got each other's arms. That's the story of, that's the glory of love.” - Bette Midler.