In 2017 Stacey Grant-Canham a new mother with no experience in business started a small handmade business from her kitchen table.
Since then, Black & Beach has reached over 20,000 customers worldwide, supported dozens of local suppliers and creatives and raised £16,047 for women’s rights charities.
In the next five years we will build on our ethical, feminist achievements by becoming a B-Corp Certified business, expanding to bring more people into the flexible working Black & Beach team and start a free feminist business mentoring programme for underrepresented women.
We adopt a ‘Social Partnership Sororite’ approach to business, working alongside and consulting with customers, producers, partners, suppliers, staff and charities to design and create high-quality, sustainably-sourced, beautiful and purposeful fashion.
We have a clear and transparent financial report process, sharing regular financial updates with our stakeholders. We continue to hold ourselves accountable by sharing updates and reports with our customers on our social and environmental impact.
We are a Real Living Wage employer and after salaries, any additional profits are invested back into the business to make continuous improvements to the work environment for our employees.
A large proportion of our finances are donated or invested back into women-led charities and organisations. From the start, we have given a percentage every single sale to causes we believe in, supporting the fight for abortion rights, women’s safety and migrant women’s advocacy. In the last five years, we have given almost £17,000 to support feminist, women-led causes and we project to double this to donate £26,000 in the coming five years.
From January 2024 we aim to give 10% of net profit to causes we believe in. We also donate time and resources on a pro bono basis, in 2023 this was valued at £1000.
In the spirit of social partnership, we have changed the legal structure of the business from shareholder-led to stakeholder-led. This places an emphasis on good governance that embeds a purpose beyond creating profit and requires us to consider the impact of our actions on our stakeholders as well as shareholders.
