EP169. B Corp Beauty Coalition explained

One of the biggest challenges we face in making the beauty industry better is the fact that companies often expect their customers to be the people who demand and drive change. Which is sort of understandable if you think about it, because I'm sure many business owners think to themselves, well, why should I change the way I operate if my customers aren't interested? But that way of thinking is arguably outdated, and today's podcast topic will shine a light on the way that businesses can and are leading the change in the beauty industry. I'm talking about B Corps companies that have the B Corp Certification scheme in place with the big vision of transforming the global economy to benefit all people, all communities and the planet. These companies aren't sitting around and waiting for someone else to ask them to improve. They're doing it themselves. And last year, a group of B Corp beauty brands came together and realized that their voices are more powerful collectively than as individuals. So they formed the B Corp Beauty Coalition. Now, we all know that the beauty industry is flooded with certification schemes, many of which I'm sure we don't need. However, becoming a B Corp in some ways sits above all of those schemes because it encompasses everything. And as a result, B Corp certification may well end up being the one certification scheme to rule them all. So on today's podcast, I'm joined by Sean Russell, the Chair of the B Corp Beauty Coalition. And Sean and I are going to unpick exactly what it means to bring B Corp to beauty. So settle in, grab yourself a cup of tea and listen along to today's episode to hear all about the brands driving change in beauty. Welcome to Green Beauty Conversations, the podcast that challenges you to think about how you buy, use, make or sell your green beauty formulations. In my weekly episodes, I explore the sustainability of the beauty industry and encourage you to join me in changing the beauty industry for the better. I'm your host, Lorraine Dallmayer. I'm a chartered environmentalist, biologist and the CEO of award winning online organic cosmetic formulation school Formula Botanica. We have thousands and thousands of students in over 180 countries around the world who study with us to become organic beauty formulators and entrepreneurs. Visit our website@formulabotanica.com to try our free online formulation course. And if you want to be the first person to know what's happening in green beauty, make sure you subscribe to this podcast in your favorite podcast app. In today's episode, I'm joined by Sean Russell, the founder of Scandinavia, a fragrant specialist for home and body with a mission to inspire the world to live more Scandinavian and available in more than 40 countries. Scandinavia became a certified B Corporation in 2019, meeting the highest standards of social and environmental impact. And in 2022, Shawn helped to co found and accepted the role of chair of the B Corp Beauty Coalition, a collective action initiative of over 60 B Corps worldwide united to work together to improve the sustainability standards of the beauty industry. Hi Sean, how are you doing today?

Hi Lorraine. I'm doing great, thanks. It's a lovely sunny day in Copenhagen, Denmark.

Oh, it's lovely to have you here. This is a very interesting topic. So let's start right at the top. What is a B Corp? What's involved in becoming a B Corp?

Well, being a B Corp means that a company needs to meet a certain criteria of social and environmental impact, a triple bottom line if you will. Essentially you get measured on six different areas of the actions that you take as a business. So the consequences of what you do specifically from in terms of your governance as an organization, the impact of your actions on your people, your employees, the impact on your, your suppliers, actually the people you work with, your customers, be they retail or end customers, private customers, the impact on the community, the people within your vicinity, if you will, and the impact on the environment as well. The certification process is a non linear series of 200 questions that depending on how you answer a question, you are redirected to a follow up question. So it's essentially it's impossible to trick the system if anyone had the imagination to try and do so. And once you've completed the self assessment, which by the way is free of charge and open to anybody to do, I highly recommend it. If you choose then to proceed to certification, you are then rigorously audited on all your answers. You're asked to provide evidence on pretty much everything and you will have to defend positions so that the auditors, the nonprofit behind the B Corp organization, which is called B Lab, are able to feel confident that you live up to that particular standard. If at the very end of the process, best case scenario, that's roughly six months of effort, but can take a lot lot longer, years in some cases. For much larger organizations, if you meet a threshold of 80 points out of that possible 200, you will be certified as a B corporation. And we were fortunate to squeak over the line in 2019 at 84.1 points. Oh my goodness, barely a whisker. And it gets very close to the bone. And the vast majority of B Corps typically are in the 80s or below 100. The ones above 100 really are exceptional. The ones above 125, and I think there's only a couple above 150 are truly pioneers in business. No one comes close to being perfect because, like we all know, perfection is impossible.

Absolutely. Wow. So it's quite a process to go through then. We talked about your intro at the intro, but tell me a little bit more about what you do and how you came to the B Corp scheme.

Well, I started a company called Scandinavia, which is the name just behind me, and we, we tell stories from Scandinavia designed to leave a lighter footprint. So our whole reason for being is to inspire the world to live a bit more scandinav. Now, of course, my accent probably gives away the fact that I'm not Scandinavian, I'm in fact British. But I fell in love with a beautiful blond Scandinavian girl more than 20 years ago and followed her to her home region, a place I'd never visited before, never planned to visit, but always had vague positive associations with it. Because actually, Scandinavia, for many people around the world, is universally recognized as a region of better practice in pretty much every area. Democracy, freedom of speech, equality, health, quality of life of green energy, tolerance. Really, the Scandinavian countries constantly outperform and certainly the region as a whole always outperforms almost every other country or region in any index of merit, in my opinion. And I think after 10 years living here, firstly in Denmark, in Copenhagen, and then moving to Stockholm and Sweden and having Nordic roles back then, I was still a good old fashioned corporate capitalist from the 90s in London. I kind of began to understand what made the region so, why it was so special and why it was such a reference to the rest of the world. And I thought, aha, I get it, I understand. Now I need to tell other people because surely if something already exists that's a little bit better, shouldn't we all aspire to learn from that and become a little bit better ourselves? Was my naive logic. And so I started Scandinavia with this purpose, to inspire others to live a little bit more Scandinavian, irrespective of where they came from. And I chose to use fragrance actually as the. As the vehicle or medium to tell the story. Because I thought if I can connect with people on the sensory level, not an academic or an intellectual or political level, all the other levels that are constantly maybe discussed in the press, but no one truly absorbs, if I can connect with them on a sensory level, I might just have a way to touch their hearts that will just make them pause and reflect and perhaps reconsider. And for me, the secret is about balance. It's a balance within three areas. It's balance of the self. I think Scandinavians are typically much more balanced individually. It's balanced within society. We all know the social democratic welfare model works for everybody. There's less inequality and then it's balanced with the environment. Because up here nature very much is in charge. Seasons dominate and you really adapt to the seasons. We've got great amounts of sunlight now, but three or four months ago, it's almost perpetual dark. The extremes in temperature. You're surrounded by forests, you're surrounded by water. Water. Unlike big metropolises like London, where I came from, or Sydney, or you know, other places, New York, I just came back from Shanghai, where nature is kind of an afterthought. It's just a pleasant thing when you come out your front door and you look up here. It is everywhere in a sparsely populated region. So that that layers of balance was what I tried to do through my fragrance collection for the body and home. And each fragrance represents a different aspect of the region, precious to the locals, exotic to the outside world. And we've been going 10 years, just celebrated our 10 year anniversary. And about seven years in, I think the seven year itch, maybe we felt we needed to validate whether what we were doing was actually genuinely progressive, you know, so we have this idea that we want the world to be more Scandinavian, but actually are we living up to the standard? Are we truly walking the talk? And we looked at a number of third party certifications and there's a lot out there and all of them are relevant and good. Typically they though they tend to focus on product or packaging or ingredients or methods. Method. So it's isolated to the item that someone might buy. What's different about B Corps is that it's relating to the entire company. And we just felt that certification was that layer above that was the ultimate benchmark. And of course the brands that we admired also were typically ended up being B Corps. I mean not specific to beauty, but Patagonia, famously as a radical pioneer, the innocent smoothies in the UK and what they were doing with fruit and charity, the Guardian newspaper, the body Shop, you know, there's countless inspiring B Corps out there and they all share this purpose of using business as a force for good. So that's how we came across B Corps. It was really to validate whether we were walking our Scandinavian talk. And like I say, we squeaked over the line in 2019. And you have to recertify every three years. And every three years the certification standard gets a little bit tougher, a little bit tighter, so you can't rest on your laurels. But the mindset of B Corpse also is that you always want to get better. Because actually, one of the best things about the process is if you only got 84 points, there's another 116 that you failed to get. And it's quite clear what you didn't get. So it's, in a way, it demonstrates the path to get better in those areas. And for me, the brutal learning process of it all is you walk into a B Corp certification believing you're a good person, you're a great leader, you have a responsible company, and you come through it and you go, oh, my God. The reality is, one, all my guilty secrets have been exposed. There's nothing I can keep hidden. But two, there's so many other things that I now realize I should have been thinking about or should be thinking about that I wasn't even aware of. And I now need to take those seriously. So there's this massive sense of relief, but then there's this reinforced sense of commitment to keep improving, which I really. I'm grateful for the process, because I'm hoping through the recertification that we're actually executing right now with the audit section, we'll finish on a stronger point score. And I'd be really disappointed if there wasn't a bit of daylight between our two scores.

Well, fingers crossed. I look forward to hearing the outcome. So not only do you have your own fragrance brand, Scandinavis, but you also are the chair of the B Corp Beauty Coalition. So let's talk a bit about that. What is it, first of all?

Right, so around the time I certified my company certified, there were a couple of the earlier pioneers in B Corps specific to the beauty space who were starting, were feeling quite frustrated that despite all the good work that they did, that it wasn't having a ripple effect within their industry. And there's one brand in particular I want to highlight. Davines, the Italian hair care specialist and the CEO of that was a guy called. He's a guy called. Was a guy called Paolo Braguzzi, who's become very close to me. And Paolo is coming to the conclusion. Despite being the CE this amazing brand for nearly 20 years and pioneering all sorts of farming techniques and ingredients methods and packaging reduction schemes, the rest of the industry wasn't really changing. It reminds me a little bit of the frustrations Yvonne Chouinard had at Patagonia regarding organic cotton. You know, where they got into the 80s and still even today it's only 1% of the cotton industry is that feeling of enormous frustration that no matter what we do, stuff doesn't change. But Paolo's insight was I need to bring other B Corps together to work on a coalition or collective action group to see if we can actually basically oblige the industry to change through change that we enact together. And I was one of the lucky ones to hear about this initiative back in early 2021. And I volunteered my time and Scandinavia's support to put the formative steps to the coalition. And during 2021 there were seven founding B Corps of which David S and Scandinavians were pro. We took the most active. Paolo and I were kind of fronting the foundation and at the end of 2021 we had 26 B Corps across three continents. And we felt we were ready to announce our existence, which we did in Jan 2022. We declared our purpose, which was to inspire the industry, the beauty industry, to change for good. Beauty for good. And a year later we doubled in size. We're now more than 60B Corps on all continents. Some of the world's biggest names such as Course the Body Shop, Rituals Elemis, have just joined Veleda and then a number of other SME type businesses, quite often quite entrepreneurial, real diversity and mix of specials, specialists, generalists from all over the world. And I was elected to be the chair of the Supervisory board, which is the most senior group consisting of 11 voting members from 11 different companies, together with a representative from B Lab, the B Corp movement, who has a non voting role by the way. So it's actually an initiative that's coming from B Corp, not B Lab itself, but B Lab. Embrace collective action. And I think really we're the first example of true industry collective action that exists within the B Corp movement. So they're being tremendously supportive. And since I became chair, which is now just over a year ago, we've tried to do a lot of profiling externally of course, raise awareness of what we're trying to do. We've most importantly been having working groups focus on three areas that we are able to initiate change ourselves in stage one, emissions, not least so ingredient sourcing, logistics and packaging. Three particular areas that are highly sensitive, all of which are very relevant to all of us as producers of sellers of beauty products. These working groups, which have been open to all members and are encouraged to be members, their best people and the most relevant specialist skills are invited to in a pre competitive level, is work together on identifying standards in those areas. And actually it was only end of March, so we're just talking a month ago, Lorraine, that we revealed the kind of first tangible fruits of our collective action work together, which is what we call the navigator, the Bee Beauty Navigator, which is you can find it at be corpbeauty.org and it is essentially those three areas being detailed, analyzed and there's some. We're providing better practice guidance based on our own experiences, but also based on the certifications that are available so that we can help ourselves, we can help other beauty companies, but also we can invite beauty shoppers, citizens to visit bcortbeauty.org and get a non biased, very neutral, transparent, professional reveal of some very sensitive subjects. The Navigator tool, I hope, is just the first step in what will be a continuous effort to improve our standards and then encourage the industry to follow.

Amazing. And we'll link obviously to that in the show notes that go with this podcast on our website. So do go and check it out if you're listening to this episode. So the popularity of the B Corp scheme is certainly growing significantly at the moment. More than, I think 1,000 brands joined the scheme last year. Not all beauty, of course. Are you seeing an increase in interest, interest from beauty brands to become B Corp certified as well?

Yes, I think we're reaching a tipping point, actually. I can tell partly that because like you say, a thousand companies became B Corps in the last year and the system is no more than 15, 16 years old. So it really is really an acceleration of interest. There's so many companies wanting to certify, there's a backlog, there's a challenge on resources simply to manage the amount of interest. And it used to be a lot of SME type businesses, a bit like mine, you know, 20, 30 people companies. But now increasingly you've got some very large companies going through the process and that though inevitably takes a lot of time to run through. So specific to beauty, I'd say there's more, we're about 60 plus. I'm aware roughly that there's at least double that total number of beauty B Corps. So I would imagine, I'd like to think that eventually all beauty B Corps become members of the coalition and that we encourage other beauty companies to become B Corps because you can't join the coalition if you're not a B Corp. I mean that's the only criteria we put on it. But it is a challenging standard.

We've talked a little bit about the number of brands coming in. What about consumer recognition? Having already Been running a brand for 10 years. You are B Corp certified. What sort of consumer recognition do you see when it comes to the B Corp logo on product packaging, on websites, on brands? Does it help beauty brands?

Good question. And the quick answer is I thought it would. And the truth is awareness, public awareness of B Corp certification is really, really disappointingly low. And that's no fault of the public. I think it's a consequence of this is a non profit organization. There's no kind of marketing budgets and media spend and influence strategies. It really is a kind of inside out focus on just being better versions of ourselves. And the expectation is that the members essentially amplify membership. But that doesn't always happen because many members just choose to use it as a yardstick by which they can continuously improve. And if public awareness is so low, well why would they put it on the packaging? We actually choose the total opposite approach because we no one had heard of us in 2019 so we thought we might as well put the B Corp logo on everything that we do and proudly embrace that. And I do think things are starting to change. But in beauty, like I said, there are so many standards and certifications whether it's Cosmos, Soil association, PETA, Vegan Society, Asthma and Allergy, Nordic Swan, I mean just up here it's almost limitless what you can certify for Now I chose to just choose one because it's a small company. I thought I'll do the toughest one and that will be the standard. And I remain convinced that is the right thing to do. But there's a lot of education I think not just to end customers but also to the retailers that sell B beauty brands. Many of them don't know. John Lewis is kind of slightly different because with Waitrose they had a B Corp aisle and I think John Lewis is waking up to that. All retailers are waking up to responsibility, no doubt. But whether they are also up to date on B Corp I think is a different matter. So there's a layers of education that we need to actually invest in and it's a benchmark that gradually people will understand. But when they understand it, there's a very strong loyalty and commitment because they realize it's all encompassing. It's not just exclusive to one individual product, but it's this company that I'm buying from meets a standard that I can feel comfortable, comfortable about because it's best in class.

Well, it's commendable that so many businesses are trying to make this change and it's interesting to see that it is being business led then, rather than consumer led. Because you're right. I mean, there are many different certification schemes out there. We've covered this a number of times on the podcast already and I love that so many businesses such as yourselves want to do the right thing by the environment and society and are signing up to this set of principles that show integrity. However, I have seen some critics out there and I just want to put something to you to hear what you think of this, because I see some critics of the B Corp scheme have argued that the companies who are certified by it are effectively trying to work within the status quo rather than trying to change things because we know the beauty industry needs to change. How would you respond to those critics?

Okay, that's not a criticism I've heard before and I've heard some criticism of B Corpse as there is everywhere. Yeah, where there's progress, there's criticism. Firstly and particularly for the larger B Corps. They get a lot of criticism and then the actual certification process gets. Well, if they can get through, then how credible is it really? I mean, I've done it twice and I know how bloody difficult it is. There's no shortcuts. The standards currently, and these are being changed. And I'll explain why. The standards currently mean you have to kind of get 80 points across 200. Now that does mean actually right now you may be pretty bad at certain things, but provided you're really good at others, that will offset those weaknesses. And that's been quite normal because we're not all perfect from 2024. This year, B Corp R have evolved the standards so anyone certifying from this year onwards will have to meet criteria, specific criteria. And I think it's roughly 10 different areas that are considered to be best in class or high standard. And then from there you then have to still deliver on meeting the threshold. And I think that's a good update that will go some way to addressing some of the criticism. Again, I don't consider the old model, the one that I've done twice, to be insufficient because there's only 6,000 B Corps in the world and more than 150,000 have actually tried to do the certification, not chosen for one reason or another, not to actually complete it, probably because they can't. So it's a really, really high bar. But yeah, they're putting specific criteria in a number of areas. I think it's also because it's cross category, it's not specific to any specific industry. I find the criticism you mentioned difficult to justify, because generally if you, if you're running a business, you've got to meet these kinds of standards and they don't relate to profitability, they relate to governance, impact on customers, suppliers, community, environment, etc. If we had a specific beauty standard, yeah, I guess that's what we're doing as the coalition is to say, okay, we meet the whole B corp standard, but there's still a gap. What can we do on top of that to actually influence change in our industry? Aside from publishing better practice, which is what we've done with the Navigator, Our next steps is to say, okay, what are our three high level goals for our coalition members? Real kind of far reaching, not within the existing framework, but far reaching objectives, whether it's net zero targets or zero microplastics or 100% biodegradable ingredients, stuff that really moves the needle. And this is what the board are currently reviewing and I'm going to be in Amsterdam next week for the next next board summit and we're really kind of drilling down on what will be those three or four high level goals and then we will declare them again in public and then we will measure our progress against them transparently as an effort to try and inspire the rest of the beauty industry to change.

Fair enough. Well, I knew that was quite a hard criticism to put to you, but I was interested to hear what you had to say. I suppose the main thing of course, is that the beauty industry really that I'm talking about, the big players in particular, they drive this insecurity based fear mongering when it comes to the way we look, telling us effectively that we're not good enough unless we buy their products, which then of course drives insatiable consumption and waste. Now I know from having talked to you before this podcast that you want to redefine what beauty means and that you also don't like the term beauty consumer, which is of course frequently used throughout the mainstream beauty industry. Can you elaborate a little bit on that because that ties in with what we were already talking about.

Yes, and I've held back on your use of the word consumer so far, but now I'll go full throttle.

Please do.

I don't come from the beauty industry firstly, so I'm very green in relation to established industry practices. And then maybe that's a good thing. That's maybe why we're a B corp and I'm chair of the board. I've always had a problem with the word consumer ever since the 1990s. It narrowly defines people with A singular purpose of consumption. And I've always found it, you know, despite being in the advertising, branding and marketing game for a very long time, I just kind of shied away from the use of that word. Even though it's implicit Everywhere with a PowerPoint, slides, comes off the rolls of the tongue. It's even in people's job descriptions. It's their title, consumer insights manager or, you know, what's the consumer confidence index right now? It's a bit like gdp. It's like, is that the only way we can define the success of a company country is by how much it produces and a person by how much they consume. And then the whole environmental crisis and Greta and you know, awareness and then it's kind of like it all starts coming together and realizing I really want to push back against this concept of consumerism, but I was really looking for a different definition. The public shoppers, yes, they all make sense, but the best one is the oldest one and it's reemerging and I will do everything I can to encourage that within my industry. And it's citizens. And it came initially when I was reading a book by the British guy John Alexander, which is very much called, is called Citizens. And he's encouraging moving society from the current consumer society that we exist in into a small citizen society. And immediately, even if you don't fully understand the origin of the word citizen, you immediately start feeling different about your role as an individual on this earth. Citizen act is actually an old word that combines two words. Together people, together, people, city, zen. Okay, Right. So get it. So it's how you interact with your fellow man, fellow females. And it's also how you interact with the environment surrounding you, whether that be your city or the farmland or what have you. It's your responsibility and your role within something bigger. That's a citizen, a consumer is just consume, consume, consume, destroy, destroy, destroy. So when I the role of the B Corp Beauty coalition, I then became also very aware that we have the tremendous benefit but also the huge challenge of our industry being defined by the word beauty. That is actually the word that is the most under threat and that we must all start realizing that we need to protect. That is the beauty of this earth. Because the beauty of this earth is what enables us citizens to enjoy the lives that we have, enables the industries to continue to produce things that we wish to have whether we need them or not. And if the earth gets compromised and the beauty of the earth gets compromised, we ultimately get compromised. So there we are owning this word. Beauty. It's not like we're in the consumer electronics industry or the furniture industry or the energy industry. Our industry is defined by the word beauty. And that's so beautiful in itself. Put Beauty Citizen together, essentially it just makes you immediately re evaluate what's the purpose of beauty. The first priority is always, must always be protect the beauty of nature. You do that first, you can protect the beauty of yourself by implication. It's an obvious logic. But if you're a beauty consumer, it's what you just mentioned, it's the 20th century mentality that's shoved down your throat is you're not good at enough, you don't look good enough. If you use this cream, if you buy this product, you will be a better version of yourself. That's a beauty consumer. It's capitalizing on human frailty, if you will. It's encouraging excessive consumption. After all, we know the vast majority of beauty products are never finished because people are on to the next one. How many unfinished bottles has my wife got on her on her dressing, as I'm sure you have too? How many fragrances have I got lying around the house? I mean, it's embarrassing. You don't have the same thing with other products. So Beauty Citizen for me is a clarion call for me personally. But I also think for the B Corp Beauty Coalition and for the B Corp movement as a whole to promote the idea of citizenship. And if I can do anything to erase awareness within B corpse and beauty of that redefinition, then I will do my absolute damnedest to make it heard.

I love that. I love that the beauty of this earth is more important than our own personal beauty. And let's all become so citizens. A great message there. So one final question then. Where do you hope to take the B Corp Beauty Coalition in the long term? I know you've just launched the Navigator tool, the Beauty Navigator. What else is on the horizons and where would you like to take the coalition?

Well, first it's the high level goals that we're focusing on now. What are they? What can we all get aligned on? What is the time frame? How do we measure our progress then go public on all of that? That will be the work that we really focus on this year. That's really an external focus as much as an internal one. Because we really want to show the industry that we're not just trying to defend existing status quo or show that we're a bit better at the status quo. Because as bcops you always know that you're not good Enough, you never get an uncomfortable feeling that you should be better. So if we say we want to get to here and then we publicly track it, then it's likely that even if it's not, if it's radical, then we're unafraid of failure as long as we're trying. I know there's another, there's a. In comparison, there's the Eco Beauty Store Score Consortium that's been initiated and you know, that's some of the world's best brands involved in that. And there's a couple on both but very different purpose. They're looking at measuring impact of existing products. Measuring impact of existing products and then scoring that somehow. And then good, fine. And then customers can have an more informed decision, okay, this one is kind of green. Or however they decide that the measurement. I used to work in the food industry so I remember the whole nutritional labeling thing and I guess in a way it's something like that. It's preemptive to legislation that they're anticipating anyway. So it's an industry move to manage legislation that's inevitable. Which is totally different to that because we already think our products should be better so we want to push it forward. The other thing we'll do is certainly within our coalition of 60 plus members, we host webinars where we share better practice. We are building a network of experts around the globe in those different areas that we can be. They can be used as sparring partners, they could be used as spokespersons, they could be working on different high level goals. So it's like a kind of informal neural network of more than 60 sets of experts. We obviously will aim to raise awareness of B Corp certification within the beauty industry through our work together. And for me actually the beauty is if you think about some of the other words that have been bandied around for the last decade are more clean, green, conscious, blue, etc. None of them have specific criteria behind them. None of them even clean. And I know different retailers will define what their version of clean is, but bee beauty is absolute. You have to be a B Corp and a B Corp meets the highest standard of social environmental impact. So if any citizen is looking for a trust mark, if you will be beauty brand surely must have the highest standard out there right now. So. But that's a job to do. But with more than 60 companies involved, we can amplify that through all our channels and gradually reach more and more people like yourself.

Amazing. Well, I look forward to watching all of the progress within the B Corp Beauty coalition and within all the brands brands taking part. And I have no doubt that you will double, triple, quadruple in size as more brands come on board. Shaun, thank you so much for joining me on the podcast today. Where can people find out more about you about Skandinavisk, about the B Corp Beauty Coalition? Where can they go?

If you want to follow the B Corp Beauty coalition, we're on LinkedIn B Corp Beauty Coalition. We're also on our homepage bcourtbeauty.org is where we publish our findings. Scandinavias.com if we're in the UK, John Lewis Selfridges, Harvey Nicholas Fennec among others, we're available in and if you want to follow me for any kind of crazy reason, I've got a bit of a poster on LinkedIn just Sean Russell and you can hear my rantings.

Look forward to it. We'll include all of those links in our show notes on our website. Sean, thank you so much for joining me today. It's been a real pleasure and thank.

You for giving me the chance to share our story.

Thanks Doreen, it's been great. Thank you. I would love to hear your thoughts on this episode. Are B Corps the future in beauty? Have you heard of the scheme? Are you starting to see more certified B Corps? Tell me what you think. Leave us a comment on our social channels as both the Formula Botanica team and I love hearing from you. And if you want to hear more about some of the topics we covered, please do delve back into the podcast archives. Go and listen to episode 119 in which I interview Yashi Shrestha of Novi to talk about transparency in Beauty Beauty or episode 120 in which I challenge us all to think about whether we need all of those other certification schemes in the beauty industry. Or episode 92 in which I ask the question, how can we use beauty to formulate change? There's a wealth of information in our old episodes and I do encourage you to go back and listen to them. Thank you for joining Shaun and I for this latest episode of Green Beauty Conversations. I hope you enjoyed it. If you did, please do leave us a five star review so that other people can enjoy these conversations too. Make sure you subscribe to the podcast on Apple Podcasts or Spotify or whatever your favorite podcast app is, and stay tuned for the next episode. Follow Formula Botanica at Formula Botanica on Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, TikTok, Twitter, LinkedIn. We're everywhere. And come and give me a follow at Lorraine Dallmeier on Instagram visit our website@formulabotanica.com and sign up for our free online Formula relation course today.