B Corp!!
You may have already seen me posting about this on my socials, but if not, I’d very much like to let you know that Anna Fine Jewellery is now a fully certified B Corp!!
What’s one of those? I hear some of you ask…well…essentially, a B Corp is a company using their business as a force for good. It’s kind of like an environmental and ethical gold star, and getting it is an incredibly rigorous (and long!) process. Every part of your business is scrutinised and then you have to provide actual written down evidence to back up everything you say you’re doing. For a sole trader, one person business like me, this is easier said than done, but I’ve learned so much about how I need to keep actual records in digital form, rather than just in my own brain!
It al begins with a business “Impact Assessment” - a very long questionnaire that’s split into sections on Governance, Community, Environment and Customers, and because I’m in the jewellery industry, a disclosure questionnaire about any potentially sensitive industries, practices or outcomes.
The impact assessment took me several weeks to complete, on it’s own. A lot of the questions were quite difficult to answer from a sole trader’s point of view and some I just couldn’t answer as they were relating to things like staff, which I don’t have, or energy suppliers, that my landlord at the time wouldn’t tell me about! This also meant that I couldn’t earn the points for some questions. Despite this though, I did manage to get to the magic 80 points (I actually had over 100) that meant I could enter the next stage of the process.
Then came a long wait, partly while my impact assessment sat in a queue of others, waiting to be assessed…
It was eventually my turn to move onto the next stage though, which started with a phone call worth a B Corp agent to verbally go through my answers. I was asked to explain several of them in more detail, and they also helped me with the ones that I didn’t really understand. After this, came the hardest part, verification….
So, obviously anyone can answer a load of questions and just “say” they’re an ethical business, but this is where becoming B Corp certified differs, as you have to provide actual evidence of your answers. This saw me trawling back though last years accounts, all of the suppliers that I work with, my commissions, website sales and client emails and reviews. Now, I’ve never been the best at the paperwork side of things, but just knowing that I’d “spoken” to a client a couple of weeks/months after their order or workshop and they’d told me that they were still looking at their ring every day and smiling didn’t count. I need hard “written down” evidence, and ended up loosing a few points due to this.
I did still end up with 98.3 points though, and on the 17th May 2023 I finally became B Corp Certified!
This is by no means the end of the process though, it’s actually just the beginning… B Corp’s are definitely not trying to suggest that they are the perfect business, but they are doing their very best to use “business as a force for good” and putting people over profit.
When I started out on this journey 16 months ago, I very much had the attitude that I would just try and see how far I get. So much has happened during this time, including having to cope with being kicked out of my rented studio just before Christmas and having to move everything to a temporary space in order to continue working and earning money to feed my family! But, having just moved into my beautiful new off grid Eco-Studio, I’m now looking to the future and feeling incredibly proud to be one of just a handful of sole trader jewellers that have managed to come through the incredibly rigorous assessment process to become a certified B Corp!
