Good Clean Love was born from a dream and for as much as I have invented it, it has invented me. It was made of the stuff of my deepest enduring values which began when I was in graduate school in the 1980’s writing papers about transformative organizations like Gore Inc. who invented GoreTex and evolved the ideas that became embedded in the B Corp movement. I was fascinated by how organizations could become engines that helped people become better versions of themselves while offering products and services that were genuinely improving the lives of everyone they touched. When I graduated with a masters degree in Organizational Development, I didn’t have any idea that these ideas would guide me to become one of the first Benefit organizations in Oregon in 2013 or that my little home-grown business would become a model of how we business can and needs to be of Benefit for all.
The most basic and abiding principle of B Corps is that business should be a force for good in the world. And when we look back at our early history, we can see how general mercantile stores, blacksmiths, farriers grew up to serve the needs of the people in their communities, not only by selling goods and services but also by providing training, and work to the same communities. Most businesses today have lost sight of this original purpose and over the years many people have told me that a business sole purpose is to produce earnings. I never believed that. I always believed that the work we did was more important than the profit we produced.
This is maybe why it has always been relatively straight forward for us to pass the extremely stringent B lab certification that we have been required to do every 3 years. I always tell everyone, but especially myself, that when faced with a decision, the right choice is always an obvious one when you don’t value money first. I would lose sleep more sleep about producing petrochemical plastics than I did about not making money.
So choosing bio plastics made of sugar cane for all our products, even though they were more expensive was an easy choice.
Today there are over 5000 B Corps in 70 countries across 150 different industries with a total combined revenue of over $67 Billion. That is the most profound lesson that we and all of these companies teach is that doing good makes good business sense. Not only because customers want to increasingly align their purchasing decisions with their values, but because there is a magical power that comes from choosing for everyone, rather than choosing for one’s own gain. And this value driven business directive is taking hold, with over 75,000 companies using B Corp assessments to improve their own business models.
For me, Good Clean Love has always been a purveyor of love- in our products, our education and now our innovative scientific research at our sister company Vaginal Biome Science®. This love isn’t just in what we make, it is in how we govern ourselves and take care of our employees, it is in the choices we make to reduce our impact on the environment, it is in the sustainability and giving programs that we are continuously expanding. There are always ways to do more good when you are looking for them and this summer we hired two MBA interns to build strategic models for us to get better at everything. So look for more good coming from us here at Good Clean Love- soon to be climate neutral leaders.
Being a leader of Good is what we Love about being us. And you can’t find Clean like you do in all of our product offerings anywhere.
To learn more about B Corps and the movement of making business a force for good- https://www.bcorporation.net/
