Hi there,

Building an inclusive brand that honors our differences has been a priority since day one. We made that commitment transparent to our community and our employees one year ago today, and asked you to hold us accountable to making changes that touched every part of the Ritual brand, from our internal diversity, equity and inclusion practices to the way we speak to our audiences every day. You can read our letter here.

Meaningful change takes time and accountability, which is why, as promised, we wanted to continue our commitment to transparency and share an update. This past year has brought about a range of lived experiences for our team. For some, it has been incredibly painful and exhausting. For others, it has been a time of education, deep reflection and acknowledgement of personal privilege. Together, we’ve made some strides, but recognize we still have a way to go. It is an ongoing and intentional journey and that’s how we think it should be. A consistent Ritual.

As a team, we remain committed to:

Speaking out and taking action against systemic racism, inequality and injustice.

We’re still far from true justice and accountability as a country. Black Americans continue to be unjustly murdered for going about their daily routines. The AAPI community faces continued violence, brutality, and hate crimes. There is an alarming rise in antisemitic hate crimes. Each of these groups have distinctive experiences, yet oppression is at the core of those experiences. We stand in solidarity, and have taken time to listen, reflect and take action (and will continue to do so) by providing educational resources to our employees and community, participating in bystander training, and donating to organizations we deeply admire for the work they are doing to enact change, including Black Mamas Matter Alliance and Stop AAPI Hate.

Fostering a more equitable, inclusive, and diverse Ritual team.

We revamped our hiring process to remove biased language from all job descriptions and promote our job opportunities to broader and more diverse audiences. In addition to implementing a standardized interview process that gives all candidates a fair and equal opportunity, we’ve also trained our hiring teams to properly evaluate candidates based on their competencies and growth potential. With this updated process, we’ve welcomed more than 35 (and counting) new full-time employees across our organization — but recognize that we still have much work to do beyond hitting any specific metric. We’re pushing ourselves to build a team that not only reflects the diversity of our broader community but surpasses it.

Invest more in partners that represent diverse identities and differing perspectives that challenge our own.

This past year, we more than doubled our paid partnership spend to support increased representation and amplify more varied stories and perspectives across race, gender, sexual orientation, ability, and age. We also worked with Viva Asmelash, a trusted DE&I consultant, to help refine our organic content strategy to be more representative of our community at large. We took steps to invest in a diverse roster of creative partners, amplify experts who can add more intersectional context to causes that are close to us, and above all else, celebrate a wider range of experiences through our storytelling across our social, Journal, event programming, and lifecycle channels. We aim to continue scaling this approach.

Additionally, we’ve audited our website to ensure diverse groups have equal opportunities to learn, purchase and engage. As part of these efforts, we follow the Web Accessibility Initiative guidelines and strive to meet the WCAG 2.1 AA level.

Make a long-term impact on nutritional inequality and help bridge the gap to accessing healthy food.

In June 2020, we pledged that every new Ritual subscription would allow Food Forward to distribute 10 pounds of fresh, healthy product to communities experiencing food insecurity. We’re proud that we met our $100,000 goal six months early which means 1 million pounds of produce were rescued for families experiencing food insecurity across Southern California. We’re committed to making a long-term impact, and we’re excited to share more about our future plans in the coming weeks.

Turn internal conversations around diversity, inclusion, and racial and socioeconomic inequality into long-term sustained rituals.

This year, we’ve completed two teamwide training sessions on unconscious bias and microaggressions with one of the leading diversity and inclusion experts, Dr. Tana M. Session, and look forward to additional educational opportunities throughout the year. To actively and intentionally continue our efforts on an ongoing basis, we’ve established an internal task force to help further listen, learn and stay accountable as we work toward progress. We’ve also hired a Chief People Officer to lead our ongoing diversity, equity and inclusion efforts.

Transparency is an important part of accountability and a critical step in continuing to work towards meaningful progress. Stay tuned for more.

To Your Health,

Kat Schneider, Founder & CEO, Liz Reifsnyder, COO, and The Ritual DE&I Committee