Our mission and impact has always gone beyond pure play ecommerce. With an ethos of relentless R&D at our core, we are always exploring a fresh approach to good business growth. vvast are now proudly well on our way along the B Corp journey and we are keen to share progress, pitfalls and plaudits here.
We accelerate growth and build brand equity by deploying the vvast propriety playbook. This ensures standardisation and supported by our processes and our own technology led approach, means we can apply tweaks and concepts with relative ease.
We’re used to iterating at pace, learning from the data and engaging our brilliant team in delivering results for our brands every day.
This makes baking our Bcorp pillars into our playbook a no brainer. We are incumbent on our brands saying yes to our strategy anyway, so why not throw in a few initiatives each quarter that also drive us and them to a better, more purposeful world?
We’re tackling (head on) some juicy subjects, all hanging off our newly defined Bcorp Pillars of Sustainability, Ethical Advertising and Data in Retail.
As the explainer vvlog below demonstrates, this isn’t about us having all the answers, but it is about us engaging in concepts and ideas with our brands to drive behavioural, consumer driven change.
2022 has seen the start from basecamp as we completed the B-lab questionnaire and received our initial score. The first learning was that B Corp is so much more than environmental impact – it’s about considering our contribution to the wider community and understanding our business ethics.
Ethics are being increasingly discussed in the digital space so it feels timely to have an transparent and accountable plan going forward.
From a sustainability perspective this sparked us to do another ISO, this time 14001 – which holds us to account regarding environmental impact. This became a driver for the office move and our new home has solar and is hot on auditing and tracking.
Another key insight was that we underestimated the number of new policies we would need to commit to preparing, monitoring and owning. The team have really stepped up, and we have contracted in voluntary days where individuals can choose activities to impact on a societal, environmental or human level. Over a months’ worth across the business.
We’ve always had a keen focus on equality and value diversity, but now this has extended beyond our own hiring policies to include our outsource team in Pakistan. We’re looking forward to radiating this out to our partner brands and wider influencer network.
We landed at a higher female mix on our development and ops team by recruiting the best and we are now keen to maintain it. It is something we are really proud of.
We know that an inclusive workplace improves engagement and creates a culture of mutual respect and shared endeavour that drives productivity. Furthermore, a business rooted in our impact on the world around us can only be a force for good that will ultimately deliver more business value, for us as individuals, vvast as a whole, and our partner brand and wider ecosystem.
At the start of any successful journey it is important to have a vision of the final destination, but we can already see that this is a never ending endeavour. However, it is vital that we all start somewhere and appreciate that there is no quick fix or final frontier. Key to success is celebrating the milestones, supporting one another, and maintaining momentum as we keep putting one foot in front of the next on a mission to continuously improve.