Thirteen days early, on purpose

Every April, the same pattern runs across every feed we scroll. Logos turn green. Stock photos of forests show up in brand decks that had nothing to do with a forest in March. Then April 23rd arrives and the color fades back to whatever it was, until next year. We’ve watched this cycle enough times to know the date itself isn’t the problem. The problem is treating one day as the whole commitment.

In December, we published our 2025 goals the way we publish every year’s goals: numbered, dated, graded against whatever we said the year before. Commitment three on that list was short and specific. Begin the formal B Corp certification assessment process. We wrote it down before we knew what the process would actually ask of us, which was the point. This post is the first update on that commitment, and we’re publishing it in April instead of waiting for Earth Day because the work already started. Waiting thirteen more days to say so would have made the timing about the headline instead of the work.

So here’s where we actually are, three and a half months into the year, with the parts that are moving and the parts that aren’t yet.

What we actually started this month

We registered with B Lab in January and opened our B Impact Assessment in February. It’s a free, self-guided tool that scores a company’s operations against B Lab’s published standards, and it’s organized around five areas: governance, workers, community, environment, and customers. We’re inside that assessment now, not finished with it.

Some of what it asks is documentation we already had. Some of it isn’t. The governance section wants our written policies on ownership, decision-making, and conflict of interest, some of which existed on paper and some of which existed as "the way we do things" and needed to actually get written down before we could answer honestly. The workers section covers compensation structure, benefits, and how much say our team has in decisions that affect them, questions we could answer with more confidence than most of the others. The environment section is where we’re weakest, and we’ll say that plainly rather than dress it up.

Nothing here is verified yet. The number we get from self-scoring isn’t the number B Lab eventually certifies, and we said in December we’d publish the verified score once we have it, not before. This post isn’t that. It’s the update in between.

“B Corp Certification is an integrated business certification that assesses and verifies a company’s social, environmental, and governance impact against the B Lab Standards.”

B Lab, "B Corp Certification," bcorporation.net

Looking hard at who we buy from

The assessment pushed us into a task we’d been putting off, which is actually looking at our vendor list instead of assuming it was fine. We print business cards and event materials through a Southern California shop we picked years ago mostly because they were fast and local. Fast and local turned out to be a decent start; we’re now asking them directly about paper sourcing and ink, and moving toward FSC-certified stock and soy-based ink on our next print run rather than assuming the shop already defaults to it.

We looked at the hosting providers behind our site and our clients’ sites, since that’s infrastructure most creative havens never audit, and asked each one directly what percentage of their data centers run on renewable power. The answers varied more than we expected, and it’s now a question we ask before signing a new hosting contract, not after. We also looked at the merch and client-gift vendor we’ve used since year one and are shopping two alternatives that source domestically instead of overseas, even though the current vendor is cheaper and easier.

None of this is finished. Vendor relationships built on convenience take longer to unwind than they took to build, and we’re not going to claim otherwise just to make this section sound tidier than it is.

A remote team doesn’t have one carbon footprint, it has a dozen

Here’s the part of this work that’s genuinely harder than the assessment or the vendor list. HAUS XXIV is a nationwide remote team. We don’t have one office building with one electricity meter and one number to bring down. We have a dozen-plus home offices spread across time zones, each running its own equipment on its own local power mix, plus the flights our team takes for onsite client work and the one all-hands gathering we hold each year.

There’s no clean spreadsheet for that yet. We’ve started tracking laptop and monitor lifecycles so equipment gets refurbished or responsibly recycled instead of replaced on a schedule that has nothing to do with whether the device still works, and we’re building a simple annual travel log so the flights at least get counted instead of ignored. That’s a start, not a system. We’d rather say so than round it up into something that sounds more finished than it is.

“We can control what we buy and who we hire tomorrow. We can’t control the math yet, and pretending otherwise would be its own kind of performance.”

David Keyes, Founder & CEO, HAUS XXIV

Why we’re saying it now, before the 22nd

We could have held all of this until Earth Day, packaged it into one clean post with better math and fewer open questions, and called it a milestone. We turned that version down for the same reason we turned it down on every goals post we’ve published since January 2023. A commitment that only shows up once it’s finished isn’t a commitment. It’s a highlight reel.

We don’t have our verified B Impact Assessment score yet. We don’t have a finished vendor list or a real number on our team’s travel footprint. What we have is a start, three and a half months into a year we said would include this work, and Earth Month felt like the more honest window to say so than Earth Day itself. The day gets the graphics. The month is where the actual work either happens or doesn’t.

We’ll keep reporting this the way we’ve reported every other number on this list, as it comes in, whatever it says.