A Model to Address Climate Change Amidst a Pandemic at B Corp Allbirds
Mobilizing for the Climate Crisis As We Do for a Health Crisis
Times of crisis and communal struggle often inspire community mobilization to tackle the issue at hand. As we’ve seen, the response to the novel coronavirus has been no different.
With stay-at-home orders, social distancing measures, and other guidelines affecting nearly all of us, people have come together to rally around essential workers — often among the most vulnerable populations in our country — and to give our thanks to health care workers who are on the frontlines of combatting this pandemic.
Many companies in the Certified B Corporation community have similarly stepped up to contribute to coronavirus relief and response efforts. Among them is sneaker company Allbirds, which donated more than $500,000 worth of shoes to medical professionals then created a buy-one-give-one program for health care workers, so customers could help contribute shoes with their purchases, too. In these efforts, Allbirds sees a model for action to address other major global challenges.
“The collective action exhibited by our community has been a beacon of light in an otherwise dark time, and offers hope for how we may continue to come together to face this global challenge and others, like climate change,” says Joey Zwillinger, Allbirds co-founder and co-CEO.
Allbirds and many other B Corps regard climate change as the “most urgent issue of our time” and believe that businesses have a responsibility to address it. In a recent interview I conducted while researching for my forthcoming book, Better Business: How the B Corp Movement Is Remaking Capitalism, I spoke with Zwillinger about the company’s response to the pandemic and its goal to reduce (and ultimately reverse) the damage being wrought by climate change.
How is Allbirds addressing the pandemic?
As a B Corp, we do not ascribe to the shareholder-only model of capitalism that has led to corporate excess and poor environmental practices. Even though we felt the impact of COVID-19 along with the rest of the retail industry, we take our role as a business leader focusing on all stakeholders seriously and acted accordingly. In addition to shuttering our corporate offices and mandating that our employees worked from home to encourage health and safety, we also shut our retail stores. And despite the economic hit that we were taking with that significant loss of income, we committed to ensuring that all of our retail employees would receive their full wages and health care benefits for a four-month period, and have avoided making layoffs in our corporate team.
Even when faced with all this initial uncertainty, we knew one thing for sure: Our broader community needed help. The most obvious thing we figured we could do was provide some comfort to health care workers on the frontlines, so we quickly mobilized to donate more than $500,000 worth of shoes to medical professionals. When we were met with an overwhelming need beyond what we could do on our own, we invited our customers to also contribute via a buy-one-give-one program.
Their enthusiastic response helped further our support for health care workers during such a critical time and inspired us to launch another community-based initiative to benefit World Central Kitchen. In partnership with Strava (a company that created an app to log exercises like running, swimming, and biking), for every 5K completed by a participant, we donated $1 to WCK, up to $50,000.
The collective action exhibited by our community has been a beacon of light in an otherwise dark time, and offers hope for how we may continue to come together to face this global challenge and others, like climate change.
Recently, Allbirds chose to label all of its products with a carbon footprint. Why? And what does your company hope to accomplish with this initiative?
The word “sustainability” means 10 different things to 10 different people — from air quality, to microplastics, to biodiversity, to fair trade. While these are all important, combating climate change is the most urgent issue of our time.
Man-made gas emissions that warm the atmosphere are the primary driver of this global crisis and, as such, carbon-equivalent emissions can serve as a singular metric that all businesses can track, eventually managing down to zero.
With this in mind, we decided to label every product we make with the amount of carbon emitted during its production, development, and customer use and disposal. It provides clarity to the conversation around sustainability and allows for a future in which shoppers can compare carbon numbers at the mall just like they do nutritional labels in grocery aisles.
We hope this approach becomes the standard for our industry and beyond.
How can companies continue to prioritize addressing climate change throughout the pandemic?
We need to look at the collective response to the global health crisis as a lesson for how we can confront climate change, and it is more urgent than ever. We can’t return back to the way things were; otherwise, we will have no chance of avoiding a disastrous outcome for our species in the coming decades.
More than ever, consumers are voting with their wallets and supporting businesses who do not compromise on social and environmental issues. This trend is not going away — consumers are demanding more of companies, and the ones who thrive as we emerge from the pandemic are going to be the ones who take a hard look in the mirror at their sustainability practices and act swiftly and comprehensively.
How do these actions relate to your company’s core mission?
We’re a mission-driven company. We have a mission statement that we don’t publicize, which is, “Making better things in a better way.” What that really means is that the place where we want to fight the fight and try to make a big dent on the world is around reduction of greenhouse gas emissions.
We’ve chosen an industry that has an enormous environmental impact on the world. Over 20 billion pairs of shoes are made every year. It’s close to 2.5 billion in the U.S. alone. It’s a huge industry, and brands are not able to invest in materials quite as much because they’re getting squeezed by the sales and distribution model. And we just haven’t seen any leadership from the footwear industry, in terms of focusing on sustainable sourcing of materials.
So we have this overarching goal: We want to make a shoe like a tree. What I mean by that is, that the shoe actually provides more to the Earth than it takes away, from an environmental perspective, and particularly on a carbon emission basis. We try, quite literally, to weave the mission into the product of our company and make the best impact. So every decision that we make has to have sustainability at the core of the decision-making framework, specifically around carbon footprints.
B The Change gathers and shares the voices from within the movement of people using business as a force for good and the community of Certified B Corporations. The opinions expressed do not necessarily reflect those of the nonprofit B Lab.
