Credit: Maggie Marilyn

Since launching her namesake label Maggie Marilyn in 2016, designer Maggie Hewitt has been on a mission to transform the fashion industry with beautiful and more sustainable clothing. In 2020 Hewitt halted mass wholesale production and stepped away from seasonal collections to produce Forever collections designed to be worn and loved for many years to come.

The Maggie Marilyn ethos has now been recognised on a global scale with the New Zealand brand announcing its B Corporation (B Corp) Certification this month.

The B Impact Assessment measures companies’ social and environmental impact through a deep dive into their internal policies, partnerships, environmental outputs, social contributions, metrics used for tracking impact, and methods employed to ensure that impact is positive. Of the 196,000 businesses registered to use B Corp’s measurement tools, Maggie Marilyn joins a global community of over 4,700 companies which have achieved the certification across 77 countries. Maggie Marilyn’s earned an impressive score of 109 which represents an important vote of confidence to the brand’s unwavering commitment to People, Planet and Prosperity. The median score for ordinary businesses who complete the assessment is currently 50.9.

Credit: Maggie Marilyn

“Our purpose is to use fashion to create a better world,” Hewitt says. “Our mission is to help transition the fashion industry to one that is rooted in transparency, circularity, regeneration, and inclusion. And we believe we can achieve these things by building a community of people who will help us address fashion’s role in the climate crisis.”

“As a team, we’re honoured to be recognised for our mission to ‘Create a Better World’, and redefine what a successful fashion formula looks like. These are the roots of our brand, and the onus is on all of us to uphold these commitments for our stakeholders – every single day,” adds Georgia Lloyd, Maggie Marilyn’s Head of Supply Chain.

Make no mistake, earning this title is not easy and is often a years-long process to ensure social and environmental impacts as well as supply chain transparency is of the highest standard. Among the brand’s company policies was recognition for offsetting their Scope 1, 2, and 3 greenhouse gas emissions by 125%, making them CarbonZero certified by Toitū Envirocare; their commitment to spending over 70 percent of their costs, and operating expenses within the New Zealand economy; and over 90 percent of the brand’s purchases made in the reporting period receiving third-party social or environmental certification.

“We are not only excited to be joining the likes of Patagonia who we see as trailblazers in this movement but what really excites us most is that, as a business who intends on being here 100 years from now, this score now lays the foundation for the kind of social and environmental impact we hope to have,” says Lloyd.

Learn more about the business, here. More exciting news is to come!