How do you become a B Corp business?

Read Blue Tit’s story of how they became the first salon collective in the UK & Europe to achieve it…

Blue Tit is a collective of ten individual lifestyle and sustainable hair salons situated in iconic neighbourhoods of London, offering beautiful hair for people of all hair types, respecting individuality, creativity and freedom, all whilst ensuring it has the least impact on our planet.

Setting a new standard for the hair and beauty industry globally, Blue Tit has become the UK and Europe’s first salon collective to achieve BCorp certification; given only to businesses committed to purpose beyond profit and to leaders that use business as a force for good.

Since the pandemic, when hair services were put on pause, Blue Tit reflected and used the time to invest in expanding, training and much more. Co-Founder of Blue Tit, Matthew Gebbie, summarises what they did…

“We coordinated a Culture and Engagement manager, to ensure the culture we want is at the heart of all we do, keeping charge of good morale among staff, organising additions to Blue Tit’s customer experience, from playlists to drink offerings. We also recruited a professional of people and now ‘Head of People and EDI’, ensuring equality, diversity, and inclusion experience is at the forefront of our company, whilst also leading on sustainability strategies, awareness training and outreach to local communities at Blue Tit.

Last year, our academy team travelled around Europe with Oway and we are proud to be the Global Directors of the brand. Oway is an organic, biodynamic botanical professional Italian hair care brand. They are the first to have 100% recyclable amber glass bottles, cruelty free and have no toxic ingredients. Over the last year we have strengthened our partnership with Oway and have been working closely with them- also launching two new products in partnership with Oway – Blue Tit Finest Fluid and Blue Tit Next Day Cream.

We have enrolled multiple new training sessions for our staff. Our equality, diversity and inclusion training has made the team more engaged and keen to learn new skills. We’ve recently held a deaf awareness training with the incredible Dr Amy Kavanagh and her guide dog, had an unconscious bias training session and also had a visual awareness training. It’s so important that our staff are equipped for everyone and these training sessions and talks help with this. We also rolled out our Afro and Textured hair training for all staff through the help of our afro and textured hair educator and specialist, Pashcan’el Mitchell, who runs the training modules at the Blue Tit Academy. They are expansive, detailed and hands-on to equip the Blue Tit staff with a complete knowledge on how to care for afro and textured hair. We’re pleased to say that the 10 salons are ready to welcome all hair types and our services are now live.

It’s incredible being able to say we’re B Corp and it’s very important that as a company we are held to a code of practice. It’s a great blueprint to run the business from as it shows areas to improve whilst reinforcing all the positive actions we are taking and implementing.

It wasn’t always the goal to be B Corp but once we became aware of B Corp and looked into it, it was then something we really wanted to do and work towards. We had to review our operations, partnerships and who we shopped with. We had to monitor our energy, gas and water use and focus on ways to reduce our carbon footprint. We also focused on saving energy and water by introducing eco-heads. We introduced refill stations and reduced zero-waste and we recycle all our materials and use zero plastic.

Blue Tit will continue to set standards and targets for recycling, saving energy and working with more diverse and local suppliers. We will also be working with a group of B Corp organisations to work on continuing to reduce our carbon footprint, promote sustainability and increase awareness of the urgency of saving our planet.”

Matthew Gebbie

Matthew Gebbie is one of Blue Tit’s co-founders. Blue Tit is dedicated to promoting equality, diversity, and inclusion within their workforce while striving to eliminate any form of unlawful discrimination. Their goal is to ensure that their workforce is truly representative of all segments of society and their customer base, while fostering an environment where every employee feels valued, respected, and empowered to perform at their best.

All articles by Matthew Gebbie