Luxury swimwear brand Bondi Born has bumped up its B Corp certification to 95.5, a 7.4 point lift from its maiden score of 88.1.
The luxury business scored highest in environment with a score of 36.9, followed by community at 24.3, workers at 16.2, governance at 14.5 and customers at 3.3.
The brand joins over 50 other Australian businesses that are B Corp certified and that work in apparel.
Speaking with Ragtrader, Bondi Born founder Dale McCarthy said its original B Corp certification in December 2020 took about 18 months to complete.
“We started in mid-2019 then answering and pulling together information for over 200 questions, which dragged on through COVID back and forth with certifiers around the world through Zoom meets,” McCarthy said.
“We didn't actually have to do much to change the way we were operating our business, we were already operating in a sustainable way.
“It was all about finding time in our busy days as a small company to pull together the information and provide the documentation to verify our claims.
“We were officially certified in December 2020 and we were the 8th Australian brand in the ‘apparel’ category - and the first luxury womens or swim brand.”
The recertification process four years on was much easier, according to McCarthy, as he and his team had already pulled together all the documentation for its first submission, which was kept on file and maintained.
“I was notified on the three year anniversary of our original certification and it's taken six months to get certification done this time,” McCarthy explained. “I had one call and then it was all through the B Corp portal - we had to upload all the current versions of the information they sought, answer new questions and provide some additional data and documents.
“B Corp have clearly come a long way as well - as it was much more streamlined.”
McCarthy said one of the biggest changes to the business following its maiden score was the introduction of a code of conduct that all its staff and suppliers must abide by when working with the brand.
“It has become second nature to do the right thing and run our business in a way that upholds the code,” she said. “From an assistant buying recycled paper for the printer, our e-commerce team only re-ordering compostable packaging materials to our creative director [Natalia Gryzbowski] focusing on organic, natural fibres when designing.”
McCarthy added that re-engineering its fabric sourcing and shipping is another key change.
“We source most of our fabrics from the top mills in Europe and we were mostly shipping by air four years ago. Now our goal is to ship fabric primarily by sea - which is not only a much lower carbon footprint and cheaper, but requires us to pre-order fabrics well in advance of production.
“We have developed a core repertoire of fabrics in neutral colours that our customers keep coming back for, so we can happily order well in advance, ship by sea and know we'll use every metre.”
The brand is also working more with deadstock fabrics. McCarthy said the team is now making new pieces just for e-commerce using its own deadstock.
“And we're sourcing more from deadstock merchants,” she said. “They provide seasonal variety, remove the risk of pre-ordering and as they mostly come from Australia and NZ, the shipping footprint is lighter.
“We buy them at a fraction of the new cost and price them accordingly, so our customers win too. For example this Resort season, Natalia found a gorgeous silk chiffon at a third of the price of buying new from the mill.
“It's not something we'd normally plan to design to, but it has added a fresh creative hit to the collection and it gives us a talking point to reinforce our B Corp philosophy.”
As well as buying deadstock, Bondi Born sells deadstock to merchants or gifts to UTS, sells deadstock garments through The Outnet, pop-ups and other third party sites, or gifts to charity.
Looking ahead, McCarthy said the brand doesn’t have any major plans in the ESG space other than what it’s already doing now.
“Our primary business focus is continuing to build the Bondi Born brand and our ecommerce business in America, which is over half our revenue and continuing to grow.
“We're also planning to open retail in Australia in the next 12 months and I'm sure there will be a bunch of ESG-related decisions with that new channel.”