Town Hall Meeting: Colart’s Next Steps in our B Corp Certification
This town hall meeting featured guest speaker Catherine Draper from B Lab UK. Catherine has dedicated over six and a half years to various roles within B Corp, primarily focusing on community engagement and movement building.
She joined the town hall meeting primarily to support our ongoing engagement as a B Corp member, with a particular emphasis on informing us about how individual and independent employees at Colart can become more involved in the B Corp movement and therefore use business as a force for good.
Before the Q&A session, Romain provided a business update, which is summarised in the bullet points below:
- The sales environment continues to be challenging, with difficulties in Southern Europe and the international zone.
- The situation is relatively solid in North America, thanks to partnerships with Michaels and Amazon.
- Overall company performance by the end of August is slightly below the original target, but there is still a small growth compared to 2022, albeit a tiny increase.
- The company is growing by 3.5% compared to 2022.
- Margin management is solid, and the company has recovered three points compared to the previous year.
- Expense management is efficient due to collective work.
- The company is now slightly positive in profitability, but still not meeting the desired profit level.
- Inventory management has improved, and the company is less overstocked than the previous year.
- The company faces challenges with some brands, such as Lefranc Bourgeois, but welcomed a new brand director Clémence Blanc to work on repositioning.
- There was a recent two-day intensive meeting with leadership teams (GLT & ELT) from around the world, focused on ways of working as a team, decision-making processes, and the development of a new strategic midterm plan.
- The new strategic plan (SMTP) will be discussed with the board on September 26th and communicated to teams in mid-October.
How Can You Get More Involved With B Corp?
Join B Lab's B Hive.
The B Hive is the online platform for certified B Corps, where all members of the community can network, do business, share best practices, and inform the community on the state of the world. Watch the YouTube tutourial for the B Hive by clicking here.
We highly recommend watching this engaging Q&A session to understand more about B Corp, B Labs and how you can get involved.
Click the video below to view.
We also encourage you to send you comments, thoughts, suggestions and feedback in via the comments box below ... with many thanks.