B Corp Certification

B Corp Certification comes from a two-hundred-point B Impact Assessment covering five categories — governance, workers, community, environment, and customers — and a company has to clear a verified score of 80 to qualify. It's not a one-time badge either: B Lab requires recertification every three years, and certified companies have to legally amend their governing documents to weigh workers, community, and environment alongside shareholders, not just profit.

This is a company-level credential, which matters when you're vetting the brand behind a blank rather than the shirt in your hand — Patagonia has held B Corp status since 2012, and that certification says nothing about whether any specific fleece or tee is organic or recycled; a separate GOTS or GRS claim handles that layer. We point ethics-focused clients here when the ask is about the company behind the label, not the fiber content of one garment.

Use it to screen the brand, then still ask for product-level proof — organic content, recycled-fiber percentage, factory audits — for the actual blank going on press. A certified parent company can still source a conventional, uncertified tee for its budget line.

Buyers regularly assume the certification applies to every product a company sells, coloring the whole catalog sustainable by association. It doesn't. B Corp measures the business as a whole — its policies, its supply chain oversight, its governance — and a single item can fall well outside whatever halo the parent brand earns.