Despite what you know about our company’s high-end outdoor apparel, Karukinka isn’t necessarily in business to sell clothing. This company was started to disrupt the fashion industry, to offer a new way of doing business that benefits everyone from our consumers to our partners to the planet.
That’s why we are pursuing a B Corp certification.
Becoming a certifiedB Corp (which stands for Benefit Corporation) is a rigorous process that evaluates our company’s social and environmental performance, public transparency, and legal accountability.
Karukinka is proud to share that we have begun this process.Step one in becoming certified involves completing an assessment to just see how our company compares to others. This initial part of the process seems simple but it’s important. Over 50,000 international businesses have taken theB Impact Assessment (BIA), which is a free, online platform, to evaluate how their company interacts with its workers, customers, community, and environment.
While we already have environmental and social ethics built into our business model, the B Corp certification process serves as a guide to make sure those standards are comparable with other ethical business practices. It’s a third-party certification that validates what we claim about our business practices and shows our consumers that we put our money where our mouths are.
The exercise of filling out the BIA is an extremely valuable process as we consider our commitment to our workers and our community, according to our resident B Corp expert, María Olivia. We’ll continue to take steps to improve these every day and maximize the impact of our business model.
B Corp certification is becoming anincreasingly popular way of doing business, one that fits in with ourtriple-bottom-line way of doing business. Our values guide how we make a profit and that profit, in turn, helps us invest more in our social and environmental priorities.
As many ethically-minded companies are coming to find, most of the major crises of our time (climate change, unequal wealth distribution, racism, poverty, etc) area direct result of capitalistic greed and how much of the world does business. There are over1,800 Certified B Corps in over 50 countries across 130 different industries.
This network of B Corps and theB Economy are accelerating a global shift to redefine what success means in the business world and to build a new economy that is inclusive and sustainable. There are a lot of problems that can’t be solved solely by governments and nonprofits. The business community has to take a stand and work to reduce inequality and poverty, make the environment and communities healthy and resilient communities, and create more high-quality jobs with dignity and purpose.
Karukinka is proud to share that we are diving into the process of becoming B Corp certified. It will be a long and rigorous process to achieve certification. It will involve endless hours of paperwork and administrative tasks but we know that the process is well worth the work. We are excited to harness the power of our business and use our profits to make the planet healthier and improve the lives of the workers in Patagonia that hand makes each of our products. We also are excited to share this journey with you, the consumer, because we believe an informed consumer is a conscious one who has the power to change the world one decision at a time.
PC: Diego Jimenez
