Ms Energiser. Mr Congeniality. Ms Linguist. Mr Fashionista. Ms Social. Ms Sunshine.
Doesn’t this sound like an unbeleafable team? Well, you’d be right – B Corp Miei harnesses the money spent on flowers, produce and gifts to combat poverty.
Thrilled to be a part of this “community of movers, shakers, and change makers,” Miei is proud to be leading the way in Corporate Social and Environmental Responsibility since 2018 with their ‘profit-for-purpose’ model, commitment to zero wastage and complete transparency with customers.
Here to take us Behind The B is Miei’s Head of Creative Marketing or ‘Ms Social’, Tori Rothschild, sharing the various ways this ‘blooming tiny’ B Corp is delivering lasting change for people, planet and community.
As a purpose-driven social enterprise, our values focus heavily on delivering best practices for our local community, ensuring we’re acting sustainably in all areas of our business and always looking after our team.
These all sit under the umbrella of three major focuses of our floral and gifting business: Community, People and Planet. We believe in complete transparency, so here are a few initiatives we have implemented in each area of focus, as well as our goals for the future to inspire fellow B Corps (and keep us accountable!).
Community
Philanthropy
Our mission and ultimate goal is to close the poverty gap in Australia. Since day one, we have operated with a 100 per cent net-profit-to-charity model, contributing these profits to The Smith Family. The Smith Family empowers and enables Australian kids to stay and succeed in school, thus breaking the poverty cycle in our community.
All ongoing floral subscriptions with our corporate clients support a child through the program, and all profits from our gifts, produce boxes, events and weddings support their Numeracy and Literacy programs. Over the last five years, we are proud to have contributed approximately $45,000 to The Smith Family, and directly supported over 25 children.
Work experience
Over the last few years, we have continued to partner with The Inclusion Foundation on their Impact 21 program. The Inclusion Foundation is a for-purpose charity that champions the inclusion of people with Down Syndrome.
We share their vision of an inclusive world, where people with Down Syndrome are equal, active and respected members of society. We’re proud to support this program, which provides workplace experience and employment for people with Down Syndrome. We offer 8-12 week programs, where people can get hands-on floristry experience and potentially a permanent place within our Miei family.
Supporting small
Through our gifting channel, we’re also proud to support small businesses who are trailblazers in innovation, design and quality-made products. We aim to never stock items that are easily available for purchase in mass-market (i.e. department stores) to ensure we’re acting as a visible and accessible platform for growing businesses to showcase their products. All our gifts must also be loved and supported by our entire team, or else they don’t make it onto the shelves or into our gift hampers!
People
We believe that a good company must have a strong leader who believes in their mission, loves their people, creates effective processes, and puts their team first. We believe in heart-counts, not head-counts. In turn, each member has the responsibility to protect this mission, and be accountable for maintaining this precious team dynamic as we continue to grow.
Effective leadership and teamwork is crucial to the success of any business, and it is essential to helping us achieve our goals for better our world.
We’re incredibly proud of our internal processes and have seen the benefits in our business. We fundamentally believe in the value of shared knowledge, and have therefore made all of our internal systems available for the B Corp community to download and share. Developing secure and effective processes has been our goal since Miei’s conception, and will continue to be our commitment as we grow our business and family.
Hiring Well
We’re always looking for like-minded people who find purpose in service and want to leave a positive mark on the world. Setting agreed expectations is fundamental in attracting the right talent, and our Hiring Policy outlines the key areas of learning and development that future team members will partake in. These include:
- Weekly 1:1 development sessions;
- Regular internal Masterclasses;
- Quarterly reviews; and
- Access to external training programs.
We also have a unique process that ensures we have the team’s full support behind every new hire:
- The candidate has a preliminary interview with our Co-founder;
- They are then interviewed by each member of our team, including our second Co-founder;
- The team comes together to discuss whether the candidate is an ideal fit for our Miei family.
Professional Development
Each of our team members actively engages in Professional and Personal Enhancement sessions, including weekly catch-ups and quarterly reviews. These differ from traditional performance reviews that tend to focus solely on output and KPIs.
While weekly sessions are informal and focused on shorter term goal tracking, our quarterly Professional and Personal Enhancement sessions outline each individual’s goals for the quarter, set forth at our team’s Annual Strategy Summit.
While personal goals are drawn from in-depth collaborative discussions between our Co-founder and the individual team member, they always centre around establishing a lifelong mission statement and self-developmental objectives.
Planet
As a floral and gift destination, we need to procure stock from across the globe. However, our focus is always on reducing our environmental footprint. In order to achieve our goal of getting as close to zero-waste as possible, we’ve implemented a few initiatives to promote the reuse and repurposing of materials, in partnership with like-minded couriers and others who are carefully tracking & troubleshooting new ways to limit waste output.
Waste Tally
In 2020, we implemented our ‘Waste Tally,’ which measures and tracks everything we dispose of and repurpose. Our goal is to limit the waste week-on-week (and ultimately year-on-year) by monitoring the weight of each material and comparing them to the previous results. Some of these categories include:
- Green waste (83% of flowers currently repurposed)
- Soft plastics (to date, 82kg recycled)
- Cardboard/paper (to date, 700kg recycled)
- Water vials (to date, 10,089 water vials reused)
Selecting the right partners
It’s important for us to partner with like-minded companies who share our goal to follow the best practices for the planet, and that often means fellow B Corps. Some of our amazing partners include:
Packaging: The Better Packaging Co.
As a fellow B Corp and Aussie business, The Better Packaging Co. provides us with durable 100% compostable mailers for our online orders. They’re also able to be reused multiple times!
You might like: ‘Behind The B’ with leader in circular ‘eco’nomy The Better Packaging Co. ↗
Courier/Packaging: Sendle
Sendle is also a fellow B Corp and 100 per cent carbon neutral delivery service that supports sustainability initiatives around the globe! We also utilise their cost-effective, 100% compostable mailers for small items.
You might like: ‘Behind The B’ with carbon-neutral delivery service Sendle ↗
E-Commerce: EcoCart
EcoCart automatically calculates and eliminates the carbon footprint of our customer’s online orders at checkout and uses that cost to fund our chosen project (fuel-efficient cookstoves in Myanmar).
The ‘Take Me Home’ Initiative
As a business that focuses on sustainability as a core principle, we enacted an initiative to further limit our green wastage from our weekly corporate flower arrangements. We began repurposing these flowers into our ‘Take Me Home’ flower corner in our Docklands studio, open every weekday from 9am to 5pm.
Every flower in this corner is available to the public for a donation that supports a different vendor of The Big Issue each month. We currently repurpose approximately 83% of our flowers from corporate arrangements through this initiative!
For a micro-business like ours, the opportunity to join over the 4,000 globally recognised Certified B Corporations across 70 countries is a huge win.
The road to B Corp is not an easy one, however it’s no longer sufficient to simply claim you are implementing positive change in the world. It’s now a matter of necessity to deliver on those promises to ensure the longevity and success of your business.
Through the certification (and re-certification) process, we’ve become crystal clear on areas to improve and what to look for in future partners to ensure we’re acting in best practice. People, Community and Planet will continue to be areas of focus for our business as we continue on our B Corp journey to better our world.
Thank you to Miei for this fantastic piece, a version of which was originally published on their blog as part of B Corp Month 2022 as we invite you #BehindTheB to uncover what makes a B Corp a better business.
Looking for a B Corp partner with or procure from? Use this free tool to search for Certified B Corporations around the world ↗
