Our first Impact Report
We quietly published our 2025 Impact Report last week. The Sustainable Wedding Alliance (SWA) asked us to write an Impact Report as part of the accreditation renewal process this year. It felt like a huge undertaking, but Russ Avery led a great workshop at the SWA Retreat in February that really helped me structure the document, and whittle some of the detail down. it’s taken a lot of work because I totally fell into the detail and then got overwhelmed pulling it all together into a document! Its geeky to admit but the deep diving into the year was fascinating. Writing it up a little less so…
So what is an Impact Report?
An Impact Report is a document that goes beyond the financial health of a business, demonstrating how its progressing towards its social and environmental goals. Sustainable businesses are encouraged to use Impact Reports to transparently show what they’re doing and intend to do across the three pillars of sustainability; people, planet and profit. Impact Reports are a requirement of the BCorp accreditation process too.
The focus on impact is what makes them, I think, interesting; the question “so?” kept popping up as I wrote ours. Why is this important? Why is what we’re doing valuable?
When even the word ‘sustainable’ is being questioned within the floristry industry, I think it’s really important that we can demonstrate what we do and it’s impact.
Our Impact Report:
You can read our Impact Report here : 2025 Impact Report
I wanted our Impact Report to capture the nature of our business. We’re a happy, joyfull business selling a beautiful product, with a grounded, real-life understanding of people and the world. We needed our Impact Report to reflect this.
Our report is divided into the following sections, to keep sustainability at the heart of the document:
Highlights
People
Planet
Profit
Future Focus
By dividing our work into these different areas, we were able to see where our dataset was strong (sales!) and weak (field production and wedding usage) and see why having this information is valuable in articulating our impact. We’re now working on ways to streamline data collection on the field and studio, so that we can better articulate our impact here
A lot of the research and data is commercially sensitive but the report gives a great picture of where we’re at and creates the format for next year’s document, when hopefully we’ll have more data to explore.
Where we do have the data we can show fabulous impact:
Given the scale of this impact, we REALLY want to explain the CO2 savings of our weddings, which make up 80% of our turnover. Weddings have a huge carbon footprint and flowers are a big contributing factor… our impact will be significant!
Another area where we currently struggle to articulate our impact is in the biodiversity improvements of our land. Whilst we have incredible anecdotal records and photographs of the field’s metapmorphasis from neglected pasture to rich biodiverse habitat, we don’t have data to back it up. We’re now trying to be more regimental in recording what we see and hear throughout the year.
So – as ever – we’ve identified things we need to improve as a result of this work but we’ve also started to illustrate that our impact is significant and a lot bigger than one might think for a small business.
I’d love to know your thoughts on our Impact Report. Does it give you a better idea of what we do? Are you inspired to do one yourself? What else would you like me to include next year?