Climate Neutral Just Launched Our Second Certification Cycle
The first year is in the books. Here’s the story.
June 30th marked the unofficial close to Climate Neutral’s first certification year. 144 brands took the leap of faith with us, measuring and offsetting their carbon footprints, and setting out on a course to reduce their future emissions. We purchased over 200,000 metric tonnes of carbon offsets from projects around the world. Over ten million consumers learned about us through all manner of digital and printed media.
We will now focus on recruiting new companies to join us before the end of the year and become certified in early 2021.
If you read no further, here’s my one request: help us certify more brands.
In our first year we proved the concept. It’s time now for the concept to become a movement. An unassailable, irreversible, unparalleled, bona fide game changer for climate change.
Join us. Bug your employer and your favorite brand. Bring the business you own. Nudge your friends. We’re aiming to certify one million tonnes of carbon from 2020, and much more beyond that, and need more than 100 new brands to commit by the end of this year.
Okay, so let’s rewind a bit.
Mid-February 2019: the non-profit organization Climate Neutral’s paperwork hits the State of California register. Thanks to the marketing masterminds at our founding organizations Peak Design and BioLite, we hit the ground running with a unique brand and message: all companies should become Climate Neutral Certified. If all companies in the world did this, we’d go a long way toward fixing the climate problem.
And so the clock starts. We have three months to figure out exactly what it means to become Climate Neutral Certified. We take to the books, reading up on standards, certifications, rulebooks, marketing regulations, and voluntary climate commitments from around the world. We know the label and certification world is crowded, but each conversation reaffirms one of our founding principles: consumers, especially those in the US of A, are very concerned about climate change but haven’t been effectively mobilized against it.
We make our first addition to the team, Jack. He dives into designing the certification with gusto. Meanwhile, our founding teams from Peak Design and BioLite work feverishly to prep us for a stage debut at the Outdoor Retailer Summer Market in June. It comes quickly. I get butterflies as I turn the corner on 14th Street in Denver and see the Colorado Convention Center enshrouded in our message and our label. The genie has left the bottle.
Sixteen companies announce they’re joining us. A dozen others follow quickly. We pin our first major media hits. And the real highlight is that I get to shake Alex Honnold’s meaty hands in person.
Summer 2019. Caitlin joins us to lead our marketing program. Then it’s September and Climate Week NYC. We’ve rounded up three dozen committed brands. For the first time we hear that people are talking about us when we’re not in the room. That’s a big moment. Climate and sustainability veterans seem excited by our model and our strategy. It’s clear we’re part of something much, much bigger, and the bar is raised: to achieve impact at scale, we must innovate amidst an unmistakable (and hugely positive) trend toward corporate climate work.
Innovation #1: our footprinting tool, which is deep in R&D mode by Fall. We’ve got five months to produce credible footprints for the 36 companies we expect to certify in early 2020. Had we known it would be 130 companies, we would have been way more stressed. Ignorance can indeed bring some measure of bliss.
In October, our Peak Design friends come through yet again, launching us into the world of crowdfunding on Kickstarter. No one does it better than them. We pick up backers by the hundreds. Advocates and influencers pile in. By the end of the campaign we’ll have added thousands of people to our family of supporters, tens of thousands to our operating funds, and raised over a hundred thousand dollars to pour into carbon-reducing projects. It’s not the hugest fundraising story of the year, but it’s an amazing showing.
In November, we catch a huge break: the top tier law firm Morrison Foerster agrees to bring us on as a pro bono client. Their amazing attorneys will guide us as we confront tricky strategy, legal, and contracting questions. Then Bella joins us, our fourth employee, just in time to jump headfirst into our certification process. Then the IRS officially recognizes our 501(c)(3) status — a critical feature of our delivery model.
We affectionately name the footprinting tool the Brand Emissions Estimator (BEE) just before beta launch. It’s full of bugs like every beta software release. But it gets us through the certification cycle — along with a massive supplement of patience and goodwill from our certifying companies. Most importantly, the concept is solid enough that we get some stage time with the Outdoor Industry Association and agree to help the companies in their new Climate Action Corps. And suddenly the BEE looks like it’s going to buzz much farther afield than just our internal use.
By March, the pandemic is in full swing. We release an update to the BEE and most of the bugs are now, mercifully, dead. Meanwhile our certifying brands are still working their way through our process. Fingers are crossed. We receive incredible news that the Mulago Foundation has selected us for a philanthropic grant. Their model is perfect: impact at scale, built on a framework of brutal simplicity.
It’s April, and Earth Day. Our incredible team has planned for this day for over a year now, and we deliver more than 100 certified brands out into the world. Media is muted thanks to COVID-19, but the world still talks a lot about climate. Soon after, we find out we’ve been selected for the Fast Forward Accelerator program for tech nonprofits. It’s a huge nod toward our potential and should get us in front of some great folks in the tech world.
And so here we are at the beginning of a big push to recruit our next group of companies. We’re getting regular reports of our label out there in the world and even seeing signs that consumers are responding to it by choosing certified brands. That’s incredible. We also have an awesome and growing team of volunteers helping us through a whole range of content and technical projects.
If you’ve made it this far, you’re a true believer. Thank you.
And because you’re a true believer, I’m going to leave you with a punch list of things we’re really buckling down on between now and the end of 2020:
- Brands, brands, brands. We have 135 certified now and would like to grow our impact to 250. Difficult, no doubt, in this strange and troubling year, but we know we can get there — because we’ve already been having discussions with a mix of awesome consumer brands and innovative business services companies. So: bring on the brands.
- The BEE. We think we’ve got a pretty good thing going with our first version of our footprinting tool. We know it can be way, way better. We’ll be convening user feedback conversations throughout the year, and expanding our user base, and looking for specific funding and partners to make the tool an industry standard. If you have ideas, please share them.
- Fundraising. We will always operate a lean organization, but we want to add to our awesome team and need the funding to do that. So we’re looking to meet more amazing funders like the ones we already have.
- Our place in the world. Not to get all existential on you, but we think a lot these days about the core problem we are working on — climate change — and how it relates to the other problems we face in the world — structural inequality and racism, for example. There are no easy answers, but we won’t let go of searching for how we can fill a meaningful role.
Our small team couldn’t be more fired up. Thank you to our founders, funders, and fans, our brands, partners, and supporters. We immensely value all of your help. Thank you for an awesome first year. This is an incredible opportunity to build a climate initiative that gives hope to consumers, motivates companies to lead on climate, and is worthy of your trust.
Keep sharing your feedback and ideas so that we can continue building something truly awesome.
Stay well.
