We’re proud to say, Brink’s been awarded full B Corp certification 🥳

When Lea Simpson and I started Brink, our ambition was to create the company we had been searching for. A future-focused business doing non-trivial work, and a place where people could build meaningful, exciting careers they loved and were proud of.

We were done with old orthodoxies that ‘doing business’ means we make money at any cost, and are self motivated above all else, or that ‘better business’ is code for charity. We felt there must be a way to change the rules of the game, and that a truly progressive modern business could navigate making profit with making a positive dent on the world, and fully integrate the two.

We are really excited to reach a new milestone for this ambition, as we have just been given full B Corp certification.

“The certification means that we are part of a community of leaders driving a global movement of people who use business as a force for impact, and use B Corp to hold ourselves to account.” — Abi Freeman, Co-Founder, Brink

We are proud to be joining the likes of Patagonia, Kickstarter, Ella’s Kitchen, Simply Business and Eileen Fisher and over 3000 companies around the world, each measuring our impact across every facet of the business, and being held to a benchmark that’s a transparent and quantifiable standard.

B Corps fundamentally changes the rules of the game

More than a membership, B Corps are required by law to balance the interests of shareholders with the interests of workers, customers, communities, and the environment. We have amended our Articles of Association to reflect this. We are bound by law.

“B Corps fundamentally shift power structures and the legal system which reinforces them.” — Jay Cohen Gilbert, CEO, B Corp

As business owners, Lea and I have set out to add our own voices and approach to a growing cohort of peers doing things differently. We watched as Unilever launched their Sustainable Living Plan, which has seen a stock price rise of over 300% over the past ten years, and as GE made returns of over $230 billion from products made through its clean-tech-focused Ecomagination Initiative.

We’ve seen that B Corp members outperform the market in their sector, growing 28 times faster than the national average. It’s clear to us that customer and user demand is there. It’s on businesses to step up and to keep up with that demand. I’m hopeful that with more companies stepping up as we have, we can accelerate change in the right direction.

We know where we’re at, and you do too

The B Impact Assessment shows companies like us where we rank in terms of impact on workers, customers, community, and the environment. It is the only certification that measures a company’s entire social and environmental performance, comprehensively and objectively, and gives a quantifiable benchmark to measure ourselves against.

We know where we’ve scored well and where we need to improve and our team and customers do too, because scores are shared on the B Corp website, for anyone to see. Honest, open, transparent. We are held to account.

It takes a score of 80/200 to be accepted into the network, and we are proud of our score of 94.4. We have more work to do. But we’ve been recognised for all our efforts so far.

As Brink turns 2 in April 2020, we find ourselves with a growing team and a growing need for infrastructure — the gaps in our score are a backlog of operational things to work on, like

• codifying our practices into formal policies, from whistleblowing to breastfeeding
• having more formal feedback systems in place for our clients
• better engagement with stakeholders and clients about our environmental and social performance
• better measuring and tracking of our carbon footprint as a company

We are going to use this membership to hold ourselves to account for the decisions we make and the impact we are having in every stage of our business. There’s a new SDG tracker which B Corp and the UN Global Compact have created as a tool for businesses like ours to chart our next decade of progress towards the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and we’ll be monitoring that, too.

We’re proud to have joined the 3000+ companies in the B Corp community, and will continue finding ways to improve our B Corp score and our contribution to the SDGs.

If we are providing our team of Brinksters with meaningful work they love, we are seen by our clients as peers and partners who go beyond lip service and truly act with positive impact, and if we continue to measure well against the high B Corp benchmark we have chosen, then Brink is on track against the standard we set for ourselves when it was still just an idea looking to make its way out into the world.

What else can we do to make our work more purposeful? Please share our good news, tell us about your approach to any of the above, and if you are a business leader creating change in the world, consider joining us in the B Corp community.