Staying True To Our Roots By Making A Change

My father has always been an innovator and an entrepreneur, my mother a powerhouse who knows how to get things done. Together, they have been the driving force behind Badger, a small mission-driven business founded in 1995 that strives to create healing products, run a healthy business, and make a positive difference in the world. Today, Badger has over 100 employees and our products are sold in 20 countries. We are a manufacturer of natural and organic skin care products, but the products we make tell only part of our story. At our core, we are a mission-driven business and our mission in its simplest form is "healing products, healthy business, make a difference". As our company continues to grow, and the world around us changes, our values are the one aspect of our business that we want to remain unchanged.

About 6 years ago, Badger reached a critical point in our business trajectory. We had about 50 employees. We were still operating out of an old, retrofitted garage and farmhouse. And we were on the verge of explosive growth. In fact, we were starting to see consistent double-digit growth. Clearly, it was time to break ground on a new manufacturing facility. And yet, despite all the success, and the obvious need to upgrade our cramped quarters, we felt some trepidation and had a lot of questions. What would happen to our intimate community of co-workers when we hired new employees? What would happen to our mission as we rapidly expanded operations? Until this point, our mission had lived in individuals and in our close-knit family. What we needed was a blueprint to help us transition our values into the DNA of our business. It was at this critical point that we discovered the small but growing movement of certified B Corps and quickly realized that the B Corp certification was a tool that we could use to build our mission into the operations of our business, helping us to stay true to our roots even as we entered a period of rapid transformation.

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