We are a B Corp!

The B Corp certification measures how mindfully a business produces its goods, how well it looks after its employees, how carefully it chooses its suppliers, how strongly it governs itself, how it gives back to its community, and how it helps to protect the environment.

One of the best ways to explain how B Corp is helping change Sheard for the better, is to look at what changes we have made for our key stakeholders and how these are positively impacting them.

Our key stakeholders are not just our senior management, workforce, and customers, we cast the net wider and include our local community, suppliers, and the environment among our most important stakeholders. In all our decision-making processes, we prioritise the well-being and interests of each stakeholder group, ensuring that no one is overlooked or undervalued.

Over the past two years, we have introduced many changes that have positively impacted our various stakeholders:

Workforce

• Every member of our workforce receives compensation aligned to the [Real] Living Wage.
• Numerous benefits have been introduced including life insurance, free gym membership, monthly free food events, as well as talks from inspiring speakers.
• Employee wellbeing is a core pillar of our sustainability strategy and for us this includes supporting mental health. Every member of our workforce has access to counselling services through our employee assistance platform. As well as this we also offer free counselling for our employee’s children up to the age of 25, through locally based charity Invictus Well-being.

Customers

• We use customer feedback to make sure we are giving our customers excellent customer service. In our most recent survey 81% of respondents expressed satisfaction with our overall service and an impressive 87% of customers expressed satisfaction with the quality of our products.
• With the launch of our Mobile Innovation Centre, even if our customers can’t get to our site, we can bring our latest innovation direct to their door!

Suppliers

• We have started working with our core suppliers to screen for social and environmental impacts, believing that working together will help us achieve our long-term impact goals.

Local Community

• Giving back to our community is important to us. We fully track our charitable giving and set targets to ensure accountability.
• We have supported local primary schools by providing resources and helping transform disused land into a woodland learning area.
• Additionally, we support Forget Me Not Children’s Hospice through initiatives such as our employee volunteering scheme, event funding, and garden improvements.

Environment

• Our products are a naturally renewable solution for sustainable packaging and are 100% recyclable. We hold the FSC® Chain of Custody Certification for all our products we produce.
• Other changes we have made include installing 2620 Solar panels generating up to 1.5MWp, electric car-charging points in our car park, increasing the amount of waste we recycle (76% between May 2022 – April 2023), and switching from single-use plastic to paper cups on site.

A lot of work has gone in to achieving B Corp certification with Abigail Sharp, our Sustainability and B Corp Lead, co-ordinating various members of our team to get us to this incredible achievement. Here’s what she has to say – “I am really pleased to say that we are now a B Corp Certified business! We achieved an excellent score in the assessment, and we are really grateful to be recognised by B Lab UK as part of a global community of businesses that meet high social and environment impacts. B Corp for us is a continuous improvement model – this achievement marks not the finish line but the baseline. It helps us understand our current business performance and challenges us to improve upon it!”

Our whole management team has supported this whole process. Managing Director Lee Shackleton is immensely proud of what we have achieved as a business – “We are thrilled to announce our achievement of gaining B Corp certification! As a business we had been exploring different frameworks that could help measure, manage, and improve our social and environmental performance, which is when we were first introduced to B Corp. Utilising the framework provided in the B Impact Assessment (BIA), it has allowed us to build upon initiatives we were already undertaking, while continuously pushing ourselves to excel further beyond our expectations. 

Gaining B Corp certification reflects the dedication of our entire workforce, and each and every individual will continue to play a vital role in maintaining this certification and achieving our long-term sustainability goals!”

This is just the start of our B Corp journey here at Sheard. Keep watching this space as we keep you up to date on all of the projects we are working on, to continue using business as a force for good!