Catch up with Rebecca Murphy, North South Wines

This B Corp month, we caught up with Rebecca Murphy, Sustainability Manager at North South Wines about their B Corp journey and our work together.

Short on time? Here’s the TLDR!

• North South Wines are a wine distribution company founded in 2014 and based in Oxfordshire with 27 staff
• They certified as a B Corp in 2023 and are one of the few global wine suppliers to do so
• In B Corp month North South Wines are having fun with sustainability, partnering with other B Corps, including having sustainable cocktails with Sipsmith Gin!
• North South Wines and Climate Change Coaches are both among only 12% of certified B Corps to be women-led
• Climate Change Coaches group coaching programme is helping the company’s senior team to land their sustainability strategy into the business at large
• Our structured, online sessions carve out the time for teams to create shared vision and ownership for environmental targets and bust blocks to implementation
• North South Wines chose the Climate Change Coaches for our upbeat, inclusive approach to bringing everyone into the sustainability conversation

North South Wines was set up in 2014 by Founder, Kim Wilson. They are unusual in their industry for having B Corp certification, and are on a mission to do business better in wine distribution. The company sources wines from all around the world, selling to UK retailers. Over the last decade they have grown from a team of 5 to 27, and now work with over 30 producers. They supply wines to every type of business from Tesco, Aldi & Waitrose, to national on-trade, cash and carry stores, national wholesale, right down to independent retailers.

Being socially and environmentally responsible was always part of the North South Wines DNA. From the start, Kim’s vision was to build customer relationships with transparency and support, and to create an enjoyable workplace that encouraged staff development and had women in its leadership. Another clear aim from the start was to source products that championed organic and biodynamic practices. Rebecca Murphy, Sustainability Manager, who joined the company at the beginning explains that

“although sustainability was not explicitly mentioned 10 years ago it was ingrained in the foundations of the business.”

It was a natural move for North South Wines to become a B Corporation, which the company did in 2023, scoring 88.5 points. Rebecca says “We are one of the few B Corp wine distributors globally, and our certification has helped to highlight the benefits of the B Corp movement to our competitors, our suppliers, and our customers in the UK.” Their B Impact Assessment report recognised the high standards they had already achieved in social and environmental impact. They are now helping other wine suppliers to certify, and are proud advocates for B Corp, and for improving the impact of the wine industry.

B Corp “gave us the structure and framework for continual improvement. B Corp’s five pillars - Governance, Customers, Workers, Environmental and Community - with a focus on accountability and transparency made sense of the vast subject of sustainability” says Rebecca who used the B Corp framework to develop a broader sustainability strategy for the business.

Climate Change Coaches are working with North South Wines to land this strategy into their operations by bringing all of their senior team into the conversation. This starts with in-depth interviews with five of the senior team to understand their concerns and interests. The diagnostic tool that we have developed for interviews gets to the heart of what is exciting or challenging for leaders, and identifies the deeply-held principles and values at stake for each person, so that those principles can be brought to life in the sustainability strategy. This is how we ensure that a strategy ‘sticks’ and feels relevant. We then produce compile all of the recommendations from the interviews into a report, which effectively creates a laundry list of practical ways to implement the strategy. When we start group coaching sessions we are therefore on the front foot, with a clear idea of what the team needs to focus on.

Rebecca asked the Climate Change Coaches to work with the team following the team’s Carbon Literacy training, which was designed to give everyone a good grounding in the knowledge of the climate crisis. From there the next stage was to connect this broader picture to the company’s own sustainability strategy. Rebecca explained:

“I was intrigued by what the Climate Change Coaches do. I could see the benefits their sessions could offer and how this would help the whole of North South Wines to embrace our sustainability strategy.”

Charly Cox, Executive Director of the Climate Change Coaches explains “This is the moment when the rubber hits the road, and there can be a smell of burning! While most leaders are keen to address climate change, this can easily slide down the priority list because time is tight and other workstreams are more familiar or well charted. Our sessions purposefully place focus on this new priority and create a neutral space in which people can share legitimate concerns. This makes sure that everyone voluntarily comes on board with change, and finds their own place in it. That in turn helps teams to more easily overcome hurdles as they come up.”

Rebecca appreciates that the Climate Change Coaches sessions will help the company to have an open conversation about their sustainability targets: “highlighting any obstacles the management team foresee to fully embracing the need for change, and also giving them tools to cascade these skills to their teams.” She believes firmly in the need for distributed ownership of sustainability “There is no point in having an ethos, strategy, and a sustainability manager if this is not embraced by the whole business and lived and breathed. Equally however this should not be something that is forced onto individuals. I have strong relationships across all our teams, and a deep understanding of their focuses and challenges. Our team need the tools to be able to see how to make change, and how this will benefit the company, our stakeholders and themselves. This is what I am hoping our work with the Climate Change Coaches will deliver for the management team and then this will filter throughout the business.”

After 17 years in the wine trade, Rebecca can tell how special North South Wines is. ”Because we are relatively young, we have been set up with a new fresh approach – questioning the norm and trying to do things differently, which translates into our sustainability approach. What makes North South Wines really special is that our founder Kim is constantly striving to see how we can be better as a business. We have more women in management positions in comparison to the majority of the wine trade and that gender diversity is key to bringing new perspectives into the company and the industry. It was also Kim’s vision that led us to certify as a B Corp, and this B Corp month we will really be celebrating!”

The company will be pulling out the stops this B Corp month, including running sustainable cocktail making with staff, for which they’ve wangled gin samples from their friends at Sipsmith Gin! They will also hold a sustainability challenge for the whole team with a list of tasks to perform throughout the month to win prizes from another B Corp, Elvis and Kresse. They have also announced the launch of a long-term partnership with local mental health charity Restore, and in B Corp month they will host mental health awareness training by the charity as well as volunteering in the Restore allotment, which is particularly helpful for the recovery of Restore clients. Rebecca says “We will also be joining panel discussions and supporting local B Corp businesses with their activities. It’s a great community to be a part of.”

If you want to explore becoming a B Corp, check out https://www.bcorporation.net/en-us/certification/ or get in touch for a chat. We’re always happy to help more businesses join this brilliant community.

Charly Cox

Executive Director and Co-Founder at Climate Change Coaches | Our Team

Charly co-founded the Climate Change Coaches in 2018, and pioneered the field of climate change coaching within the coaching sector. She co-authored the first book on the subject for Open University Press. A successful entrepreneur, Charly founded her first business, a creative agency in Sierra Leone, West Africa, which served clients in the development sector on three continents, before pursuing a coaching career in leadership development. Charly has been a professional coach since 2012. She is currently an Entrepreneur in Residence at Oxford Brookes University, and holds a Masters degree in International Photojournalism & Documentary Photography. She is also a Trustee of the Friends of St Joseph's School for the Hearing Impaired in Sierra Leone.