Benefit for All

dRMM became a B Corp in November 2023, after a two-year process of reviewing our practices, data gathering, and compiling this information to submit for verification. It took slightly longer than we’d have hoped because of setting up our Berlin studio around the same time, but a backdrop of focussing on these five B Corp pillars guided us through a period of studio growth during which we started making changes. We’d been interested in joining the B Corp movement because it dovetails with our ethos as a company, gives us a worthwhile structure to work within, and encourages us to keep pushing ourselves to improve through the discipline of the annual impact report and the three-yearly re-certification process.

As architects, we’re all getting used to being rated and judged for our buildings’ environmental performance. But B Corp’s ‘Impact Areas’ of Governance, Workers, Community, Environment and Customers takes that good intent and harnesses it into evidenced action. These categories are concerned with our own business operations and the efforts we make in seeking out collaborators with similar values to us, not just our architectural output.

A little like signing up to the Bennetts Associates’ ‘Tell the Truth Anti-Greenwash Charter’, B Corp has moved us further in the direction we’d like to go, and under a non-competitive umbrella. This collective action also applied to the evidence gathering and number crunching with Part I, Part II, architects, associates and directors involved with help from finance, marketing, sustainability and EDI groups within the practice. We also gratefully received help from people in other practices; from the Heads of Sustainability network, and in particular from Ben Hopkins at Bennetts Associates.

dRMM has always prided itself on being ahead of the curve, championing the use of timber and sustainable design methods before the industry mainstream. We co-founded UK Architects Declare and played a part in its development through our presence on the steering group. Improving equality and diversity in the industry has been important here from before they became buzz words; for instance, over 50% of our directors, and our studio, are women, and over two-thirds of the studio attended state school either in the UK or abroad.

Architecture is a competitive business. However, the ethos of B Corp is more about being part of a community of high standards. No one has completed B Corp, there’s no graduation ceremony, we are all on the same path. We want to do better for ourselves and the planet and don’t see why these things need to be mutually exclusive. B Corp itself is undergoing a process of change. Having already revised their standards six times in the past 17 years, they are carrying out extensive consultation on the current set.

B Corp already has its detractors; people have accused businesses of hiding damaging data behind good headlines, and using certification cynically, but this sort of perfectionism can be self-defeating. If we’re all casting around for the most perfect model on which to base our operations on, then what advancement is made? ‘The journey not the destination’ may be a cliché these days, but the reality is that we are always works in progress. Things change, practices need to adapt, and B Corp provides us with a good, dynamic grounding framework in which to learn. Development is required to retain this accreditation and we look forward to the process.

Read how we did here, and some notes on our scoring below.

We found the B Corp process both challenging and humbling. The perfect score is 200 and we started off with potential for 111, with 80 as minimum requirement and 50.9 the median score for businesses in general. After the verification process, where claims are substantiated with evidence for every point, we dropped to 96.7. There are areas for which we were chuffed to see how well we’d done – things we naturally did and had been doing for years. There were other areas where we didn’t do as well as we would have liked. As the system is geared towards the US market, we had some frustrations about the lack of US/UK equivalency. For instance, during the verification process we were not able to demonstrate the equivalency of the RIBA 2030 Climate Challenge to the recognised US system of Architecture 2030. This is being looked into during the current B Corp consultation.