Earth Week

Earth Week is a time to reflect on our impact on the planet and consider how we can improve our action to protect it. At vvast, we’re committed to sustainability and are taking steps to incorporate it into our business practices. Here’s a look at what we’re doing here at vvast.

Journey to becoming a BCorp and Sustainability

As part of becoming a purpose-led business, we developed our three-pillar strategy that heavily incorporates sustainability into our playbook. Benchmarking off the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals (SDG’s) has been key to rolling this out to our stakeholders, with the objective of BCorp certification as the ‘gold standard’ in Retail, with submission on the horizon. Our outgoing office solution is holding us back on bettering our environmental impact, but we’re working hard with stakeholders in this area to improve. We appreciate that this is a journey and we have to start somewhere.

Partnering with Ecologi

We’re excited to announce our partnership with Ecologi, a BCorp company that helps businesses establish a climate-friendly workforce by tracking and offsetting their carbon footprint, through Gold Standard and Verified Carbon Standard credits, but also investing back into the planet through tree planting. What we particularly like about this partnership is the tree planting not only focuses on tree species that is most impactful to the environment, such as Mangroves, instead agroforestry species are also planted to benefit legitimate human needs in areas of poverty, which overtime (alongside other community projects) should be a source of sustainable income.

ISO Accreditation

We recently earned our ISO 14001 certification in Environmental Management, which has boosted our BCorp Impact Assessment score. We’ve also had a kick-off workshop aligning our ISO standard with BCorp and our pillars based on the UN’s SDG’s and will soon be diving into the individual pillars of sustainability, ethical advertising, and use of data in retail. We should also mention our ISO 27001 accreditation has been in place for two years and has helped us strengthen our commitment to data privacy and security.

The Future of Retail

The retail market is a significant contributor to environmental degradation, with many companies focusing solely on short-term profits rather than long-term sustainability. However, there is a growing movement towards sustainable and ethical retail practices, with consumers increasingly demanding transparency and accountability from the brands they support.

Engaging Our Partners

As a result, brands that prioritise sustainability and environmental stewardship are better positioned to succeed in the long run. At vvast, we believe that sustainability is not only important for the health of the planet, but also for the health of the retail industry as a whole. We are committed to supporting sustainable practices in our own operations and partnering with like-minded brands to drive positive change throughout the industry. Where we have started is measuring outcomes against targets set; encouraging our brands to opt into our three-pillar strategy, and a code ethics being rolled out to suppliers.

Engaging Our Teams

We’re committed to engaging our teams in stepping up our collective sustainability efforts. Internal focus groups have begun, and the team have committed to hold themselves accountable with individual objectives to deliver our three-pillar strategy. We’re all ears when it comes to hearing our team’s ideas, the innovation is being driven by the collective efforts of the vvast team to better planet and people.

Communicating Our Efforts

We’re transparent in communicating our impact and journey stages. BCorp certification imposes transparency on us, and we’ll be sharing our progress quarterly with our brands once we start rolling it out, as well as public impact reporting.

At vvast, we’re committed to investing back into the planet and building a sustainable future. We believe that sustainability and business can coexist and are excited to continue taking steps towards a more sustainable future.