2019 was a busy year for GladRags! We said goodbye to long-time employee Eliana (we miss you!) and welcomed Kelsey to our team. Behind the scenes, we called 2019 our “glow- up” year and improved many of our internal systems and processes while re-certifying as Benefit Corporation in October of 2019. Below you’ll find a few of our very favorite accomplishments of the year.

With the support of our customers and a matching donation from Spooltown, we raised over $1,200 for The Trevor Project, an organization focused on suicide prevention among LGBTQ+ youth.

Our team participated in the first B Corp day of service by volunteering at Project Lemonade. In June, we again joined the local B Corp community for the BLD (B Corp Leadership Development) PNW conference to strengthen our understanding of equity, diversity, and inclusion issues. We left feeling inspired and proud to be a part of this work.

Kelsey, Tracy, and Margaux of GladRags volunteer with Project Lemonade for B Corp Day Of Service. They're standing at a table with GladRags products.

GladRags partnered with a number of non-profit organizations to bring free menstrual products and menstrual health education to those in need. Highlights included working with Catholic Charities’ refugee resettlement program and Portland Parks and Recreation’s Youth Conservation Crew.

We diverted 100% of our manufacturing “waste” from the landfill in 2019. Our fabric scraps found new life as adorable toy animals for kids in crisis, bibs for elders suffering from dementia, stuffing for classroom beanbag chairs, and more.

New editions of our booklets Passage: A Guide to Periods (formerly Passage: A Girl’s Guide) and Menstruation Sensation were released in 2019. Our understanding of gender and menstruation has evolved since their initial publications, and the text edits in these new editions reflect our commitment to inclusivity for all menstruating individuals.

A smiling Kelsey in glasses holds up the new print copy of Passage: A Guide To Periods.

In our re-certification in October, GladRags earned 100.5 points on the B Impact
Assessment administered by the non-profit certifying agency B Lab. We choose certification
through B Lab because their rigorous assessment is continuously updated to ensure that it
remains relevant in an ever-changing world. This new version of the assessment was a
challenge for us, and we saw our overall score decrease this year — although it is double the
score of average/non-certified businesses of a similar size and type.

In this assessment we were proud to achieve particularly high scores in the areas of ethics
and transparency, worker engagement and satisfaction, supply chain management, and
resource conservation. In 2020, we plan to increase our staff volunteer hours and better
monitor the impact of our donations and educational workshops to ensure they are effective.

Our small team is looking forward to another exciting year of growth, change, and learning in 2020. Through it all, we continue to ask ourselves not “how can we avoid making a negative impact on the planet?” but instead: “how can we do the most good?”