If you spend enough time outdoors, you eventually develop a fairly ruthless relationship with gear. Does it work? Does it last? Is it worth carrying? At Wild, those are questions we ask constantly, and over the past couple of years we’ve put a fair amount of Sea to Summit kit through its paces, from sleeping mats in the Snowies and a full sleep system on a cold Blue Mountains night to a collapsible cook set crammed into a sea kayak.
But there’s another side to outdoor gear that is much harder to assess from a tent, trail or kayak: how the company behind it operates. Sea to Summit has now opened that side of its business to scrutiny too, becoming a Certified B Corporation, following an independent assessment by global non-profit B Lab. The certification looks beyond individual products to assess the company as a whole across five areas: governance, workers, community, environment and customers. It also isn’t permanent; Sea to Summit will need to go through the certification process again every five years.
It’s a certification with some relevance close to home, too. We Are Explorers, which sits alongside Wild within the Adventure Entertainment group, is also a Certified B Corporation. While the two businesses operate in very different parts of the outdoor industry, the underlying idea is the same: looking beyond what a company produces and putting greater scrutiny on how it operates. For an industry built around spending time in wild places, that’s a conversation worth having.
More Than What’s In Your Pack
It’s worth making an important distinction here. B Corp certification isn’t a certification that says a particular sleeping mat, dry bag or cooking pot is environmentally perfect. It’s a company-level assessment of how the business operates, covering areas that customers rarely get to see when they’re standing in Paddy Pallin comparing two sleeping bags.
For Sea to Summit, the assessment extended into its governance, employees, supply chain and environmental practices. The company says the work from here will include supplier partnerships, responsible sourcing, supplier screening and audits, chemical management and material compliance.
Sea to Summit CEO John Rosair described becoming a B Corp as “not the finish line. It’s a checkpoint.” That’s probably the useful way to look at the announcement. Certification establishes where the company sits now; maintaining it means continuing to demonstrate progress when the business is reassessed.
We’ve Seen The Other Side: The Gear
Wild readers will be familiar with Sea to Summit for a more tangible reason: we’ve used plenty of its gear.
Earlier this year Wendy Law took an Ultralight XR Insulated Air Sleeping Mat, Circuit Down Sleeping Bag and Aeros Premium Pillow into the Blue Mountains, sleeping out as temperatures dropped to around 5°C. The mat’s warmth and support were particular standouts, while the complete setup struck a useful balance between comfort and the weight and bulk you actually want to carry into the bush.
Wild Editor, James McCormack has also spent time on Sea to Summit’s Ether Light XR and XR Pro mats in the Snowies. His verdict wasn’t complicated: they were thick, quiet and seriously comfortable, while improvements to insulation allowed Sea to Summit to increase warmth without going backwards on packed size. Just as importantly for anyone who has fought an inflatable mat back into an undersized stuff sack, they were easy to deflate and pack away.
Then there’s the Frontier Ultralight Collapsible Cook Set, which James took on a sea-kayaking overnighter where packed volume mattered enormously. At a measured 257g for the pot, cup and spork, it packed impressively small and worked well enough to temporarily displace a much-loved billy he’d owned since his teens. It wasn’t completely beyond criticism as the supplied spork was too short for comfortably digging into a freeze-dried meal pouch.
Those experiences don’t tell us how Sea to Summit treats its suppliers or structures its governance, of course. But they do give us some familiarity with the products sitting at the other end of the business.
Tested By Australia
There’s also an interesting connection between the B Corp announcement and something else we’ve covered from Sea to Summit this year.
Back in March, we looked at the brand’s Tested by Australia project, which took members of its design team into the Kimberley to put gear and prototypes through the sort of heat, dust, water and repeated abuse that’s difficult to reproduce inside a laboratory. What stood out was the amount of largely invisible work behind outdoor equipment: material choices, coatings, fibre density, foam structures, repeated prototypes and small design changes that might never be noticed by the person eventually using the product.
B Corp certification looks at a very different part of Sea to Summit, but there’s a similar theme running through it. A lot of what determines whether an outdoor company is doing a good job happens in details most customers never see.
Read more specifics about Sea to Summit’s B Corp certification here.
