Now in its fourth year, our annual Sustainable Investment report is an opportunity for us to share with you how we and our portfolio have been improving our impact in 2023. Whilst there is always more that can be done, we are proud to continually push our partner brands, ourselves, and our community to be better businesses.
Publishing this halfway through 2024, we should highlight that many of our partner brands have already gone beyond their 2023 achievements, but our goal is to accurately report the data in a given year. In sustainability, good reporting means avoiding estimates, proxy data and greenwashing. This is why we also always report on the areas where the portfolio is not performing as well. We believe that this transparency is important for long-term meaningful change.
In 2023, our portfolio became more sustainability-focused than ever before. We invested in another certified B Corp business, Ancient + Brave, and welcomed two of our existing partner brands to the B Corp community, Bloom & Wild and The Thinking Traveller. This means that five brands, 38% of our portfolio, were certified B Corp by the end of 2023.
To codify our focus, we developed our model for growing sustainable businesses. This is built from our own sustainability journey, speaking to our community of brands, the wealth of knowledge gained from B Corp certification, and our network of sustainability experts. The goal of this model is to understand how a business can shape its operations and processes to become a sustainable brand legend.
We are also investing time into the wider brand community, which you can read more about on page 10. As a signatory of the Investing in Women Code, we read the British Business Bank’s 2023 report Pathways to Improve Diversity in Venture Capital Investment with interest and it has caused us to step up and develop our inclusivity processes and projects.
We are hugely proud of everything we and our portfolio have achieved and everything we have plans to achieve in 2024.
In 2023, 53% of our portfolio brands’ employees were women and the average gender pay gap was 11.5%, whereas the UK average is 14.5%; 100% of our product-led partner brands used renewable/recycled/recyclable materials in products and packaging; and 36% had made net-zero targets with a further 36% committed to making them in the next two years. Net zero is also on the agenda for Piper in 2024, and we are proud to report that in 2023 we removed all Scope 1 emissions from our operations.
You can read the full report here. Please let us know any feedback.