Farm Rio receives B Corp Certification

Brazilian fashion and lifestyle brand Farm Rio has become a B Corp-certified company after launching a global programme to reimagine its business model around the social and environmental fundamentals such as performance, accountability, and transparency.

The brand, founded by Katia Barros and Marcello Bastos in 1997 as a small marketplace booth in Rio de Janeiro, has become a household name in Brazil and globally and has more than 2,000 employees.

Known for its love of floral prints and lush greenery inspired by its homeland of Brazil, Farm Rio has placed environmental responsibility at the heart of its brand, and since launch, it has implemented many community initiatives, including one with the Yawanawa Indigenous people to support their rich heritage, work, and community.

Farm Rio has also been on a journey to actively transform its footprint into a positive initiative towards communities, climate, and nature. This has resulted in the brand being 100 percent carbon neutral since 2021, from print design to order delivery and donating one tree via a partnership with One Tree Planted for every purchase online, in-store and through authorised retailers. Since 2020, the brand has planted more than a million trees.

The brand also created Re-Farm Cria in 2022, a sociocultural-driven project for Brazilian minority youth that invests in creativity, sustainability, and equality while developing a programme to preserve biodiversity in six Brazilian biomes while working with Onçafari and other entities.

For the B Corp certification, Farm Rio's operations were assessed across five key impact areas: governance, workers, community, environment, and customers. The brand scored 85.1 points as part of Brazil’s largest fashion retail group, Grupo SOMA.

Taciana Abreu, head of sustainability at Grupo SOMA, who has been at the forefront of the process since 2016, said in a statement: “The Impact B assessment was the major diagnosis that guided our institutional and brand sustainability agenda, supported together with our Materiality Matrix, ESG strategies and goals.

“The immersion in the process made us more mature and helped to create a transversal culture in the company, which today thinks about everything it does through the lenses of positive social, environmental and economic impact."