Hi there,
Transparency has been a core value for Ritual since our start. It is part of our DNA and a commitment we have made to our employees and our customers. Today, we want to share where we are when it comes to diversity, equity, and inclusion.
Over the last few weeks, we’ve been listening, reading, and reflecting. We’ve had challenging, and sometimes uncomfortable, conversations with our team, our families and our children. We’ve been asking ourselves what we could do better to be a more inclusive company internally and externally—not just in this moment, but forever. And while it’s often difficult to admit to your own gaps as a business and a leadership team, we found many.
We believe that Black Lives Matter. And as a business, we have the privilege and a responsibility to speak out and put greater action against systemic racism, racial inequality and injustice. Our first step is to make changes that will touch every part of the Ritual brand, from our internal practices to the way we speak to our audience every day.
Together, as a team, we commit to:
Foster a more equitable, inclusive, and diverse Ritual team.
It is clear that this is not good enough. We’re committing to hiring practices that result in a team makeup that not only reflects the diversity of our broader community but surpasses it. We have plans to continuously evaluate our process to remove unintentional bias, conduct external company training, be more proactive and intentional about diverse candidate outreach and continue to develop our diversity, equity and inclusion toolkit and employee resources.
Invest more in partners that represent diverse cultural backgrounds and differing perspectives that challenge our own.
It’s important to us that our customers feel seen, heard and represented by the people we photograph, the communities we champion, and the stories we tell. We are setting new content and paid partnership goals to support increased representation, surface more diverse stories, and offer varied perspectives. Measures of diversity, and specifically racial diversity, will also become primary business metrics, for which we as leaders, teams and individuals will be held accountable. By amplifying voices that are often marginalized, we can surface more diverse stories and offer varied perspectives.
Make a long-term impact on nutritional inequality and help bridge the gap to accessing healthy food.
We’ve always had a food-first philosophy. We believe you should aim to meet most of your nutrient needs through the foods you eat, and take a multivitamin to help fill gaps. But we also need to recognize that this is a privilege and that for too many people, the real nutrition gap is access to healthy food altogether—a byproduct of many systemic inequities. We are eager to commit to making an impact here as well, in partnership with those that have been fighting for food equity for decades. We’re excited to share more about our plans in the coming weeks.
Turn internal conversations around diversity, inclusion, and racial and socioeconomic inequality into long-term sustained rituals.
We’re committed to actively and intentionally continuing the conversation by establishing employee resource groups, conducting training using an expert third party and scheduling monthly cross-functional team breakout sessions to further listen, learn and stay accountable.
This is just the start. We’ll keep you informed about our progress along the way. So stay tuned here as we continue to update this page.
To Your Health,
Kat Schneider, Founder & CEO, Liz Reifsnyder, COO, and The Ritual Leadership Team
