MIO Culture, Innovative Designer, Shows What B Corps Can Do

March 01, 2022 Post a Comment

Meet the Disruptor: MIO Culture

As B Lab holds its annual retreat this week, the local designer and sustainability consultant talks nearly running—and encouraging others to run—a socially-conscious business

Oct. 17, 2016

Brothers Isaac and Jaime Salm founded MIO with one objective in listen: To enable others to design highly personalized living spaces that are both beautiful and sustainable. But MIO is also a consultancy, every scrap every bit primal as the design department: The company works closely with its clients to help them implement its forward-thinking products and services.

Jaime, who oversees the blueprint side of the business concern—his brother Isaac handles the numbers—first conceptualized what would ultimately become MIO while a student at the University of the Arts. Over 15 years later, the visitor is at present a leading innovator in the field of sustainable design.

In anticipation of this calendar week'southward B Corps Champions Retreat—when 300 socially-witting companies from 22 countries are converging on Philly—we spent a few minutes with Salm, talking about how even MIO tin go along to improve its civic and ecology bulletin.

Todd Snider: Tell me about the origins of MIO, and its culture.

Jaime Salm: Well, it was actually near ideals, you lot know? That being sustainable was logical. I realized that information technology was most looking at your impact and being responsible about what y'all're designing.

My thesis turned into a project that Anthropologie bought. It was a signage, made out of recycled waste newspaper, and that gave me the seed money for MIO. I realized at that place and then that in that location is a market for sustainability and there's a market for sustainable products.

So I created a business plan: The visitor would have to, 1) create products, and those products would be made locally and would be made responsibly, as responsibly as we could; and, 2) we would really do design consulting and nosotros would endeavor to work with companies to bring these sustainable ideas to life, both in their visitor and in their larger marketplace.

TS: Equally a consultancy, is there whatever overarching trouble that yous tend to encounter from your clients?

Salm: A lot of the clients that we work with started their companies a long fourth dimension ago. And at that indicate, sustainability was not something that they were measuring. So for them, it's kind of tough to say, 'Oh, how do we account for this now?' because you lot have to start reinterpreting and changing the visitor civilization, and changing visitor culture is very tough.

If y'all're a new company, and y'all say, 'Well, what are our goals? How practice I align my values with my business?' and so it's pretty piece of cake, because y'all're starting from scratch. If you already have all this infrastructure, if you already have all these employees, you say, 'Hey, guys, nosotros're going to change this company from the ground up,' because sustainability is office of what's at the heart. Information technology becomes part of your mission. Then information technology'due south a different framework.

TS: Would y'all become so far every bit to say that irresolute that mindset might be a harder, or even more time-consuming, task for MIO than actually implementing these new designs?

Salm: Admittedly. I think designing sustainably—selecting materials, wheel assessments, all of this stuff—it'south not rocket science. But changing people's ideas virtually what their companies should exist or what a production could exist, it'due south huge, you know? You lot're learning again something that you thought you knew. You have to interact with them, yous have to understand where they're at, you have to understand what their fears and concerns are. And some of them are very existent and very valid, then it's very difficult to alter.

TS: Why did yous want MIO to become a B Corporation?

Salm: We had been looking at B Corps for a while, and we hadn't pulled the trigger on it —but in reality, we were already a B Corp, you know what I'm saying? We were already doing all of these things from the get-go. What was actually nice almost being a B corp was that the B corp framework is non simply about saying, 'Yep, we're dark-green, here'southward the show,' but it's also saying, 'What are you lot going to exercise next?'

[As a] B Corp, you are able to see what other companies have been doing, and y'all're able to measure out yourself against that and say, 'We could be doing more.' And, certainly, MIO could be doing more. There's so many opportunities for u.s. to become a more than sustainable company, a more responsible company, a more transparent company. All this takes a footling scrap of—not a little bit, a lot of—work, and a lot of resources, and a lot of focus.

But that'southward part of the nice affair nigh B Corps: It's a continuous challenge. Yous want to go greener, you want to increase your impact, you want to make certain you're contributing to the people that are working for you, you desire to make certain you're contributing to the companies you're working with. That's the attribute of B corps that I similar the near—yous know, at that place is a framework for you to measure yourself, and hold yourself accountable.

TS: What does the idea of existence civically engaged mean to you, specifically?

Salm: Well, at that place'southward a lot more piece of work that we desire to do on what I phone call the MIO Social and Environmental Report. It'southward a report that we've been working and developing a framework for. How do you get your manufacturers to report what they're doing and how they've been doing it? How practice you measure out your products? I mean, nosotros practice some lifecycle assessments, but what are we comparing them against? Every bit a company, I call up we have to do a lot more than documentation to our customers and also to our employees and the people that nosotros work with. And so factories, vendors of all kinds, I think they need to know what we're about. And we practise a good job, but we could practise a much, much better task, and we should be much more thorough than we currently are.

TS: Lastly, what advice would you give to companies that are thinking about becoming B Corps—especially in low-cal of what you said earlier, that yous guys were initially going back and forth about information technology?

Salm: I would say, 'What are y'all waiting for?' Honestly. If you believe you should align your personal values with your business and with what you do for, say, 60 to 90 percentage of the days in your life, I hateful, and then why wouldn't you lot? How much of your energy is dedicated to actually going to piece of work and making a divergence and doing something that you care almost? Why shouldn't that thing that y'all intendance about exist attuned to club and the planet? I think that that's the question you accept to enquire yourself.

And so it's non such a hard choice. Because you lot say, 'Okay, aye, I'thou going to make sure that what I do everyday makes a difference, so I'yard going to make sure that I'one thousand able to mensurate it, and quantify it, in a reasonable mode. And there are peers out there that I can compare myself with.'