Brand Advocacy Drives Impact Throughout Supply Chain: How B Corp Beautycounter Builds Stakeholders Into Its Activism
Customers and Consultants Integral to B Corp’s Advocacy Efforts and Sustainability Goals
Launched with safety as its “North Star,” Beautycounter pursues its mission for safer personal care products by advocating for changes in state and federal laws and refusing to use harmful ingredients — with the ultimate goal of greater consumer safety and environmental sustainability. The Certified B Corporation relies on its strong network of sales consultants and loyal consumers, as well as a growing presence in retail stores, to increase its advocacy efforts through its growing brand awareness.
By involving consumers and consultants in its advocacy work, Beautycounter also hopes to demonstrate the importance of using their voice as agents of change — and encourage them to use it. Through its advocacy work, the B Corp has proven its mettle as a leader of “clean beauty” with a list of more than 1,800 ingredients it refuses to use in its products, called “The Never List.” Beautycounter regularly shares information about its product ingredients — all of them, not just the ones the company wants to tout — with its customers through its website, emails, and product packaging, and the B Corp provides materials and opportunities to its network of consultants, even setting up trips to Washington, D.C., to advocate for cleaner beauty product standards and ingredient transparency requirements.
Beautycounter has also led and learned through sustainability efforts that include packaging changes, supply chain requirements, and other measures that ensure transparency and reduce the company’s carbon footprint.
“The idea is to use our brand purchasing power to fundamentally shift these industries, either toward more humane work conditions or away from environmental abuses,” says Lindsay Dahl, senior vice president of social mission at Beautycounter.
“If we’re a brand that says we care about people and we care about safety, we should also care about the safety and health of people who are helping bring our products to market.”
Through practices like these, Beautycounter highlights ways for businesses to exercise their influence to create ripple effects for more positive impact through their stakeholders — supply chain, workers, customers, and the environment — by including them in their decision-making processes. I recently spoke with Dahl to learn more about the B Corp’s current work as part of my research on socially focused businesses related to my book, Better Business. Below are excerpts from our conversation.
Can you say a little bit about Beautycounter’s approach to sourcing, packaging, diverting waste — all of those really important environmental activities that companies do?
Lindsay Dahl: Our sustainability program is built on three different priorities. The first is sustainable packaging, second is responsible sourcing, and third is understanding our environmental impacts and then working to reduce them. We’ve tried to focus because there is so much within the field of sustainability. There’s so much impact that any company has on the environment.
We know there are challenges in the personal care packaging space. We basically had to look at our vast product assortment, and say, “Where can we have the biggest impact?” We’ve been transitioning to glass where we can. We’ve been looking at alternative materials, like post-consumer recycled plastic and ocean-waste plastic, to see how we can integrate those into our lines, and we have a focused strategy around refillables.
We’re using cross-industry collaboration to help solve some of these packaging issues, because it’s really hard to do it on your own. So that’s one of the many benefits of how the B Corp community has helped us both feel a shared sense of empathy of how hard it is to do this work and find solutions.
For sourcing, we looked at a few key criteria: What are ingredients that are critical to our product line? We need to know that they’re safe, because safety is our North Star, and, simultaneously, which of those ingredients have high-risk issues related to human rights and labor issues? That led us to mica, used commonly in makeup products; vanilla, which is our signature scent in our lip products; and palm oil derivatives. That’s how we’ve focused our responsible sourcing program. The idea is to use our brand purchasing power to fundamentally shift these industries, either toward more humane work conditions or away from environmental abuses.
We’re also looking at more behind-the scenes pieces, such as understanding the comprehensive impact of our greenhouse gas emissions and wastewater from the manufacturing process, to get a baseline so we can start to chart a path toward our goal to be carbon neutral by 2030.
What recent examples of packaging changes or initiatives can you share as an example of improving your company’s impact while responding to consumer demand?
We revamped our anti-aging line, which is called Countertime, and we relaunched it entirely in glass. Glass is an interesting material because, while it’s one of the few materials that will not lead to any sort of toxic chemical, it can have a higher carbon footprint. We sourced our glass from North America instead of from Asia, saving an estimated 5,200 miles distance per product.
We paid a premium for it, but we know prioritizing our environmental and social impact is mission-critical for our brand and really matters to our current and future customer base. What we found is we were able to reduce the carbon emissions by transitioning to glass from our previous packaging material, which was plastic and most often not recyclable. So, our packaging is a highly recyclable material now that also had a carbon-reduction win for us. We felt like it was a win, not only for the consumers, who want recyclable and plastic-free options, but also for the environment.
Regarding sourcing, how do your standards as a B Corp play into your selection of suppliers? And how do you monitor them for compliance?
Whenever we’re selecting a supplier — whether it be packaging, ingredients, or a manufacturer to help us actually manufacture the product — we do a pretty extensive interview process with them. We introduce them to the brand and our standards, because they also need to sign up and say, “Yes, we want to work with you,” because by industry standards, we have stricter and more demanding requirements that mean all of our suppliers have to be on board and willing to comply.
We also have what’s called the Blueprint for Clean, with our 12 pillars, that basically walks through every policy that we have, both in beauty policies and packaging policies. Our supply chain is expected to be compliant with this blueprint. We monitor that through a supplier scorecard as a way for us to be able to assess traditional operations of on-time delivery and mission compliance alongside safety and sustainability standards.
We like to use it as a carrot rather than a stick to help incentivize our supply chain partners to say, “Those of you who go above and beyond to meet our high standards will, in turn, receive more of our business.”
We just encourage other brands to not feel like you have to have all the solutions, especially when it comes to sourcing, because it’s so complex. It’s OK to muddy your way through a messy process. But it’s the right thing to do to ask the hard questions, because if we’re a brand that says we care about people and we care about safety, we should also care about the safety and health of people who are helping bring our products to market.
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.
