Two posts in, and this is the one built to hold the whole thing

"Begin the formal B Corp certification assessment process" was one line inside a five-line list when I wrote it last December. It sat next to hiring goals and a nonprofit-partnership number, four sentences of explanation and then the post moved on, because that post had other things to graduate. In April, Elizabeth picked the thread back up for Earth Month and gave it a fuller update: we’d registered with B Lab, opened our B Impact Assessment, and started looking hard at vendors we’d never really audited before. That post was honest about what wasn’t finished. It also wasn’t built to explain the thing itself.

This one is. If you’ve read either of those posts, or neither, I want this to be the single place that lays out what B Corp certification legally requires, why it’s a different animal from a sustainability page, and where we actually are nine months into a process I said in December would take years. No teaser. No progress update wedged between other news. Just the whole shape of it, on the record, the way we’ve published everything else in this thread since the first mention.

I’m writing this one myself, in first person, because the decision to pursue this sits with me and I’d rather explain it in my own words than hand it to the collective "we" that runs the rest of the haus’s public voice. Everywhere else in this piece where I say "we," I mean the haus. Where I say "I," I mean the call I made and I’m accountable for.

What B Corp certification actually requires, stripped of the marketing version

Most people who’ve heard the term "B Corp" have heard it the way I used to hear it: a label on the back of a shampoo bottle, next to "cruelty-free" and "recyclable packaging." That’s the version companies get to wear once they’ve earned it. It says nothing about what earning it actually takes, and what it takes is more than a logo update.

B Lab, the nonprofit that runs the certification, defines it plainly: B Corp Certification assesses and verifies a company’s social, environmental, and governance impact against a published set of standards, not against whatever a company decides to say about itself (B Lab, "B Corp Certification"). The tool that does the assessing is the B Impact Assessment, the same one we opened in February. It scores a company across five areas: governance, workers, community, environment, and customers. That part we’d already explained in April. What matters here is what happens after the self-scored version gets submitted.

Nobody grades their own homework. Once a company submits its assessment, an independent third-party assurance provider, not B Lab itself, audits and certifies the business against B Lab’s published standards. B Lab has been explicit that it doesn’t run this part directly: the organization "does not conduct audits, make certification decisions, or issue certificates." Instead it accredits the providers who do that work and licenses the B Corp mark to companies that clear it. The audit itself follows ISO 17021-1, the same family of standard used broadly to audit management systems, which is a fairly unglamorous way of saying the process is built to withstand scrutiny, not to hand out badges quickly.

“B Corp Certification is independently verified and audited by a third party, based on ISO 17021”

1 requirements." — B Lab, "B Corp Certification," bcorporation.net

Eligibility has its own bar before any of that starts. B Lab requires a company to operate for profit, be incorporated somewhere B Lab currently serves, have been in operation for at least twelve months, and demonstrate a real willingness to measure and improve its impact, alongside a list of excluded industries the certification won’t touch regardless of score. HAUS XXIV clears the operating-history bar easily at this point. The willingness-to-improve part is the one that actually gets tested, and it’s the part I can’t shortcut by writing a good paragraph about it.

The legal work: what changes when we sign this

Here’s the part that separates certification from a marketing claim, and it’s the part I underestimated when I wrote the December post. Certified B Corporations are legally required to consider the impact of their decisions on all of their stakeholders, not just the people who own the company. That’s not a value statement a founder gets to make unilaterally and call it done. It has to be written into the company’s actual governing documents, in a form B Lab reviews in advance to make sure it holds up.

For a traditional corporation, that usually means amending Articles of Incorporation or reincorporating as a benefit corporation. HAUS XXIV is an LLC, which means our path runs through amending our operating agreement instead, formally building language into it that requires us to weigh worker, community, and environmental impact alongside member interests in how the haus makes decisions. In jurisdictions where that kind of stakeholder language isn’t yet fully supported by local corporate law, B Lab allows companies to sign a B Corp Agreement committing to pursue the legal change as soon as it’s available. Which path applies to us depends on how our counsel reads California LLC law against B Lab’s specific requirements, and that review is where we are right now.

This is the piece that makes certification categorically different from putting a sustainability statement on a website. A statement can be quietly walked back the day it becomes inconvenient. A structural amendment to how a company is legally allowed to make decisions is not something you quietly walk back. That’s precisely why it takes longer than writing a paragraph, and precisely why it’s worth doing instead of skipping to the part where we get to say we’re one.

Where we actually stand, nine months in

Here’s the honest accounting, the same discipline this whole thread has run on since January 2023: say the real number, not the flattering one.

We registered with B Lab in January and opened the B Impact Assessment in February, both already on the record. Between February and this month, we finished a full pass through all five assessment areas for the first time, governance, workers, community, environment, and customers, with a self-scored result we are not publishing, because it isn’t the number that counts. The verified score is the number that counts, and we don’t have it yet. What changed since April is that we’ve moved from filling out the assessment to acting on what it surfaced, and we’ve engaged counsel to start the governing-document review described above, specifically to determine the correct amendment path for an LLC under California law before we submit for verification.

The environment section is still where our internal self-score is weakest, the same gap Elizabeth flagged honestly in April. The vendor work she described then, the print shop conversation about FSC-certified stock and soy-based ink, the hosting-provider questions about renewable power, the merch-vendor search for a domestic alternative, is further along than it was in the spring but still not finished. None of it is dressed up here to sound more complete than it is.

“A verified score is a number somebody outside the haus checked. Anything before that is homework, and homework isn’t a headline.”

David Keyes, Founder & CEO, HAUS XXIV

What I can say with confidence is the shape of the timeline from here. We expect to submit our completed assessment for third-party verification in the coming months, with the governing-document amendment running in parallel rather than after, since B Lab requires that legal commitment as part of certification, not as a follow-up step once the score clears. I’m not going to put a hard date on when the certificate itself lands. I said in December I wouldn’t announce a badge before I’d earned it, and putting a fake deadline on the legal and audit work now would break that same promise in a different shape.

Why this stays a measuring stick and never becomes a headline

I want to be direct about something, because it’s easy for a post like this to read as a company building up to an announcement. It isn’t. B Corp certification is not going to become a line in our pitch deck that does marketing work for us. It’s a bar we’re building specifically so somebody outside the haus can check whether we cleared it, which is a very different function than a bar we build to show people how high we can jump.

We’ve built this haus on the idea that a promise nobody can check isn’t a promise, it’s a mood. That line ran through the December post and the April post, and it’s the whole reason this process is worth the time it’s taking. A shampoo bottle can print a badge because a badge doesn’t require anyone to change how the company is legally allowed to operate. B Corp certification requires exactly that. The moment we treat it as a marketing win instead of an operating standard is the moment we’ve missed the entire point of doing it the hard way.

So here’s the commitment, stated plainly, the same way every commitment in this thread has been stated: we will publish our verified score when B Lab verifies it, not before, and we will say so whether the number is one we’re proud of or one that tells us where we still fall short. That’s the whole use of the certification to us. Not a credential to display. A number we can’t fudge, attached to a decision-making structure we can’t quietly reverse, checked by someone who has no reason to be generous with us.

What comes next, and when we’ll say so

The next update in this thread belongs to whichever comes first: the verified score itself, or the completed governing-document amendment, whichever piece of paperwork actually finishes. I’m not going to manufacture a milestone in between just to keep the thread active. When either one lands, it gets its own post, dated and specific, the same way this one is.

Until then, this is the piece to point to. Not the tease, not the in-progress update. The explanation, in full, of what we’re actually asking of ourselves and why we think it’s worth the length of time it’s taking to do it right.