We’re officially a Certified B Corp
We’re very pleased to finally be able to say it: BakerWilcox is a Certified B Corporation™️. It has taken a fair bit of work to get here, although in many ways the process has been less about changing BakerWilcox and more about putting some proper structure around the way we have tried to run the business for years.
We’ve always believed that good business should amount to more than simply making a profit, and that the decisions we make about our people, suppliers, clients and the work itself carry consequences beyond the bottom line.
Becoming B Corp™️ certified gives that thinking some teeth.
Our journey towards certification really gathered pace through Carbon Literacy training, which made us look much more closely at the environmental impact of the choices we make, both personally and professionally. It also prompted us to look at where a design business like ours could make the greatest difference. Reducing our own footprint matters, of course, but we realised fairly quickly that our bigger opportunity lies in the work we produce for other organisations and the advice we give along the way.
That thinking now runs through much of what we do, from building lighter, more efficient websites to questioning print quantities, materials, production methods and suppliers. Sometimes the best answer is a different specification, sometimes it is simplifying something, and occasionally it is deciding that what already exists doesn’t need replacing at all.
None of this arrived overnight. We’ve worked with businesses such as Nikwax, Páramo and PaulaRosa Manhattan, organisations with environmental responsibility built deeply into the way they operate, since the early days of BakerWilcox. Those relationships undoubtedly influenced us, long before ESG became something every company felt obliged to mention somewhere on its website.
B Corp™️ certification gave us a way to bring those instincts together and have them independently assessed.
And that last bit matters. Anyone can say they are responsible, sustainable or ethical. There are plenty of adjectives to choose from and, if we’re honest, marketing departments have made fairly enthusiastic use of most of them. Certification means having someone else look under the bonnet and ask for the evidence.
Good design still has to work. It still has to engage people, solve problems and deliver commercially. We just think it can do all of that while using fewer resources and making better decisions along the way.
KELLY WILCOX
For us, that process covered far more than carbon. It made us examine how BakerWilcox is run, how we treat the people who work with us, the suppliers and partners we choose, our relationship with the communities around us and the way environmental and social considerations feed into decision-making.
It has also reinforced something we feel increasingly strongly about: sustainability should not require a compromise in the quality of the work.
Our website probably makes that position clearer than we ever have before. We still want to produce beautiful identities, effective campaigns, useful digital products and properly crafted print. The difference is that we are increasingly able to consider the environmental consequences of those choices at the same time.
Good design still has to work. It still has to engage people, solve problems and deliver commercially. We just know it can do all of that while using fewer resources and making better decisions along the way.
There is also something rather satisfying about achieving Certified B Corporation™️ status after more than 20 years in business. BakerWilcox has changed enormously over that time. The technology has changed, the work has changed and quite a few hairstyles have come and gone, but the idea that we should run a business we actually feel good about has remained remarkably consistent.
So yes, we’re proud of the badge.
But we’re probably more proud of what sits behind it.
Becoming a B Corp™️ isn’t the end of the sustainability journey, and anyone claiming to have completely solved that particular problem should probably be treated with a healthy degree of suspicion. For us, certification is a useful marker of where we are now and a commitment to keep improving from here.
It feels good to have made it official.