Canadian Down & Feather Company is a Certified B Corporation™!

We’re often asked (especially by marketers), ‘What’s your thing? Why Canadian Down & Feather Company?’ What they’re really looking for is the elevator pitch – the one or two sentences that sum up what makes our company and brand stand out.

Canadian Down & Feather Company isn’t built around a punchy story. ‘We make down and feather duvets and pillows’ – that’s what you’ll most often hear us answer. It’s not facetious – that really is the essence of what we do. And while we’re at it, we try to be a good corporate citizen – good to our team, the environment, our community and our customer. Trying to be a good and well-rounded corporate citizen (especially as a small business) means we aren’t perfect, or even excellent, in any of these areas. There’s no singular initiative that we feel we can hang our hat on – we’re painfully aware of our shortcomings and how far we still are from many of our ideals.

The B Corp™ community feels like a good place for us. It is a reflection that our company meets high social and environmental standards and considers the needs of all our stakeholders in our business decisions and operations. More importantly though, it demonstrates our commitment to continue to do better and to continue to grow in ways that positively impact all – not just a few.

For us, this commitment to continuous improvement often necessitates innovation in product, process, and communications design. When the established norms or the available options aren’t good enough, we must forge new pathways. Making our own way has become habit across our organization, usually at the expense of efficiency and our own sanity. But now, more than ever, we must exercise our critical eye, practice creative problem solving, and remain vigilant in our refusal to accept the easy answer. These are the tools that will help us float above the undertow of low-quality information, Band-Aid solutions and the pressure to build around the marketing playbook of the day rather than around stakeholder needs.

We found good alignment between our approach and the B Corp Movement in the following ways:

• Maximizing profit is not the goal. We can aim for financial health and growth within reason.
• Change comes from a balance of optimism and realism. We believe that positive change is possible and the steps we take toward that change must be realistic, achievable and sustainable.
• Good business accounts for and balances the needs of all stakeholders. Rather than leaning into a single initiative or impact area, we prefer an all-around approach to corporate citizenship.
• Companies should seek to fulfill real needs. While leadership and visionary thinkers are important participants in building business for good, strategy must be grounded in feedback and input from stakeholders to ensure the greatest impact against real issues.
• Doing good makes good business sense. Corporate social responsibility goes hand-in-hand with growth and commercial success.
• We can’t improve what we can’t measure. Data and regular reporting are the foundation for understanding our impact, benchmarking against internal and external standards, setting targets, and remaining accountable to our goals.
• There is no finish line. The work of doing business better is never over. While there are certainly milestones worth celebrating, we’re committed to continuous improvement and always raising the bar.

The right decision isn’t always clear. Our days are filled with decisions small and large that have the potential to positively impact one stakeholder at a cost to another. A more generous return policy is better for our customers but creates more emissions and sends more product to the landfill. A more generous donations program is better for our community but may pull from resources that could otherwise be shared among our staff. When we engage a ‘benefit all’ mindset, even micro-decisions like whether to print a document or which vendor to purchase a cake from make us pause for a mini-impact assessment.
Some decisions, like material selection, are particularly complex. We try to balance cost-effectiveness, longevity, performance and safety with multiple environmental considerations including emissions, water use and resource depletion at production, emissions during transport, and the eventual consequence of the material after it’s reached the end of its life.
These decisions would be easier if we chose one thing to care about. Instead, we have to do our best with the information we have, make changes as more information and resources become available, and collect and integrate feedback from our stakeholders through the process. B Lab™ provides good frameworks for finding balance through stakeholder governance and benchmarking our performance against best practices. We’re happy and excited to join a community of companies around the world making the hard decisions and working toward a more sustainable, inclusive economy.

Additionally, we must acknowledge the importance of the everyday actions of our team members in bringing our corporate values to life. The picture of corporate social responsibility is often painted of larger, strategic, leadership-backed initiatives.
Our core organizational values were born at the top many years ago but evolved and grew over time in the hands of our extraordinary team. Long before we formalized them, those values were communicated, refined and reinforced in an informal way – through ongoing conversation, modeling, mentorship, and shared experiences. A culture blossomed naturally out of those principles and manifested in the actions of our team – actions small and large that were never explicitly requested or trained.
Our group is one that cares immensely about the world and each other. I wish that I could share all of the small, but extraordinary things that they do every day to give a little extra care to the planet, to our customers, and to each other. Things done quietly and without expectation of recognition. Just good people doing good things. Those things add up and do create real change in our world.