Howdy friends. Today's story is about Boise businesses that have earned B-Corp certification. If you don't what that means or why you should care, keep on reading. Enjoy!

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Boise is home to a dozen B-Corp businesses – and the number grows every year. These businesses are joining the global movement to be more intentional in what they do and how they do it, be it brewing beer, putting on a music festival, or building houses.

What is a B-Corp?

First things first, what the heck is a B-Corp? In short, B-Corp certification is essentially a badge of honor. It shows the world that a company is a force for good, inside and out. When you interact with a B-Corp business, you know your money is going to a company that treats their employees well, supports their community, doesn’t dump garbage into the environment, and actually benefits its customers.

A lil more in-the-weeds definition: B-Corp is a designation that a business earns by meeting really high standards of social and environmental performance, accountability, and transparency. A business is scored on its practices in different factors of business, from charitable giving to employee benefits to environmental sustainability. More on that here.

Receiving B-Corp certification is no walk in the park. It involves a lot of time, reflecting and assessing, decision making, and paperwork. Lots of paperwork. Lots of time.

Businesses begin with the B Assessment. This online tool measures a company’s impact on its workers, community, environment, and customers. It's free and you can take a 30-minute snapshot assessment or a 2-3 hour full impact report. You'll answer a bunch of questions about your business and how you run it. When finished, the assessment compares your answers to thousands of other businesses and gives you feedback on where your company excels and where it needs work. The last step is improving, and the assessment gives you a custom plan to implement best practices and improve your B Assessment score.

In order to become a B-Corp business, companies have to:

• Score 80 or above for its social and environmental performance on the B Assessment. Most companies score 50 the first time they take it.
• Make a legal commitment by changing its corporate governance structure to be accountable to all stakeholders, not just shareholders, and achieve benefit corporation status if possible. (You can read more about the difference between B-Corp certified and benefit corporations here.)
• Exhibit transparency by allowing info about their performance measured against B Lab’s standards to be publicly available on B Corp profile.

Meet Boise's B-Corps

​Oliver Russell was Boise's first B-Corp business, certified in January 2012. They help change makers connect with purpose-driven consumers through brand design, integrated campaigns, and cause marketing.

​Treefort Music Fest became the first B-Corp certified music festival back in 2015. The five-day fest earned its certification for its intentional mission, community impact, and environmental responsibility.

​Lost Grove Brewing became Idaho’s first B-Corp certified brewery and the 19th B-Corp brewery nationwide in 2021. The brewery was founded on the idea that "beer brings people together." The brewery uses multiple sustainable practices and sources products locally. Lost Grove also actively engage in our community with their two taproom locations and events like Shade City Brewfest which takes place in April.

​indieDwell Inc was created in response to our country's housing crisis. They construct healthy, energy-efficient, durable, sustainable homes that everyone on the income spectrum can obtain through either ownership or renting. indieDwell homes are 320 sqft to 960 sqft homes, factory-built using a steel exoskeleton from up-cycled shipping containers and a patent-pending wall design. They earned B-Corp certification in 2019.

​Proud Source Water sources water from domestic springs in the Rocky Mountains of Idaho and the Apalachicola Forest of Florida and bottles the water in infinitely recyclable aluminum. They became certified in 2019.

​goodbuy, Inc. is the world’s first platform built exclusively for shopping small. Right now, 70% of all U.S. online spending is done with just 15 mega-retailers. goodbuy wants to change that. They have a Google chrome browser extension, mobile app, and search engine so you can easily shop small businesses online. Read my story about them here. goodbuy became certified in 2023.

​Jitasa is the first and largest national accounting and bookkeeping services provider dedicated to the nonprofit sector. The company earned B-Corp certification in 2012.

​Figure 8 Investment Strategies LLC is an independent fee-only Registered Investment Advisor. They help people with investment management and comprehensive financial planning with an emphasis on social impact. The company has been B-Corp certified since 2020.

​Kelsey Jae LLC Law for Conscious Leadership is a boutique law firm supporting social enterprise and cooperative culture with a compassionate focus on law and policy, community building, and education.​ The firm earned certification in 2023.

​Freeform helps businesses create functional, comfortable, and attractive environments with comprehensive space planning, design solutions, and unique products. They earned certification in 2022.

​Flynner Design+Build specializes in beautiful, healthy, energy efficient, comfortable custom home design and construction. The company has been a B-Corp since 2016.

​Saalt creates healthier, more sustainable period products like reusable menstrual cups and underwear. They became a B-Corp business in 2019.

The B-Corp revolution

To get perspective on the prevalence of B-Corps in Boise and what it means for our city to have B-Corp businesses, I chatted with Russ Stoddard, founder of Oliver Russell. You could say that Oliver Russell is an OG B-Corp. It’s been a certified B-Corp business for 12 years.

Russ told me that more and more companies are starting to seek out B-Corp certification, and the reason behind the uptick is three-fold.

“First of all, consumers, shoppers, human beings, individuals are starting to look for this certification as like a mark of trusting companies they want to align themselves with. Second of all – this is really a big one – companies are having a hard time hiring people. And guess who doesn’t have a hard time hiring people? B-Corps. Because everybody wants to work for a B-Corp. And that’s a big advantage,” he chuckled. “And the last one is that investors are increasingly looking at the B-Corp badge as a mark of trust. They think okay, this company has its stuff together, it’s built to future proof itself going forward, and it’s minimizing a lot of risks that we might take otherwise, so okay, this is where we’ll put our money.”

Thanks for reading!

With love from Boise,

Marissa

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