Learning to Walk the Talk in Search of the Next Generation
By Shaun Russell
I was talking to a Copenhagen shopkeeper the other day, someone whose business has clothed my wife for the past 10 years.
She said the reason people buy fashion has turned upside down in the space of just a few seasons. It used to be to look good, attend a party, or treat oneself. But now people ask themselves, do I really need another dress? Is it responsibly made? Where do the materials come from? If I buy it, am I part of the problem or the solution?
The questions are not restricted to fashion. Genetically modified cotton thirstily drinks precious water and nasty pesticides from otherwise dead soil. Palm oil is in half the supermarket products we buy, and the rainforests are disappearing. Crude oil production continues to inexorably rise and find new uses despite plentiful renewable energy alternatives. Global carbon emissions have risen faster than ever since the turn of the millennium, seemingly impervious to the corresponding rising public hysteria.
All of a sudden, the word “consumer” sounds criminal, and guilt lurks behind every shop corner. Yet, ironically, the very thing that has brought us to this point is the best tool to address it. Because by changing how we all consume — governments, businesses and citizens — we can start making the change the world needs.
A Real-Life Regional Model
Like the shopkeeper’s customers, it was this growing awareness that obliged us to rethink everything that we did after just five years in business. We are Skandinavisk, a home and body fragrance company founded in 2012, based in Copenhagen and Stockholm, and built on the idea of inspiring the world to take a more Scandinavian approach to life.
Whether it be in the fields of happiness, human development, social progress, environmental performance, justice or democracy, the Scandinavian countries are often recognised as the world’s best, and nowhere else is there a region where thought overlaps and such similar progress is shared. It’s a real-life model of more equal and sustainable societies that we think the world too often overlooks.
But at the beginning of our journey, we just wanted to celebrate this. We didn’t think of living up to it.
It was not like we needed to either; our first-generation product collection had traveled to over three dozen countries and many of the world’s leading retailers, from London to New York, Paris to Tokyo. As a company, we had also just won two consecutive Gazelle annual growth awards for our financial performance, finishing as the 30th fastest-growing company in Denmark between 2014 and 2017.
While we did make changes as our knowledge and success grew — we increased local production, switched to RSPO-certified palm wax, non-GMO soy and FSC-certified paper, and removed single-use plastic — there was still a gnawing feeling this wasn’t enough.
The thing was, all our incremental product improvements — despite helping us become a Certified B Corporation — came from a starting point with no category knowledge, no scale benefits, and almost no awareness of the wider impact of our isolated actions.
Five years later, our situation at Skandinavisk was different. We were becoming known and wanted, and now we had the people and the will to improve. So, we decided to start over and challenge everything we had done before. From the ground up.
What’s Next
The result is a “Next Generation” product collection that is more local, natural, organic, ethical and responsible, launched seven years to the day we started trading — our seven-year itch, if you will. Key aspects include:
- The majority of our sourcing, ingredients, and production now originate from inside Scandinavia, and all our finished products are now 100% vegan and cruelty-free.
- Our fragrance formulation criteria are stricter than the EU’s in that we allow no suspected carcinogens or hormone disruptors and make sure all our formulae contain nothing that would require a warning label on the box.
- For our body care, we use dosages of certified organic ingredients above the minimum criteria specified by European organic formula certifiers so that, in most cases, our products will be more organic than competing certified organic products.
- We stopped using palm and paraffin waxes in our candles and replaced them with a local Swedish rapeseed blend that is traceable, sustainably-farmed and non-GMO.
- Our packaging—be it FSC-certified paper and wood from managed Swedish forests, partially recycled glass from the EU, or bioplastics from sustainable plantations—shares documentary evidence of a more positive footprint.
For the Future Good
It’s a lot of changes that we can be very proud of. But it’s still not perfect.
Indeed, just like the process of B Corp certification, our journey to a more conscious product proposition has also helped us understand how much more there is to be done.
This process can either be very motivating or very demoralising. To such a degree that, at this stage of awareness, you seem to have one of two choices: You can either hold your hands up, accept defeat, quit, and go live off the land, or you can put down a marker and carry on moving forward in the belief that, for every journey to a better place, you have to take a lot of steps to get there.
We chose to do the latter. We also chose to call our new collection the “Next Generation” because we know that one day it will not be good enough, and that future generations of products will need to replace it.
To meet the demands of the next next generation.
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.
Consumer as Criminal? How B Corps Are Changing the Fashion of Business was originally published in B The Change on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.
