
Boma Brown-West Succeeds Mia Davis To Guide Credo’s Impact And Sustainability Efforts
As the clean beauty segment contends with both critics challenging its validity and consumers pressing companies to bolster their sustainability credentials, Boma Brown-West will play a pivotal role in charting its course.
The former lead engineer for sustainability at Whirlpool Corp. and spokeswoman for the Environmental Defense Fund, where she helped shape Walmart’s sustainable chemistry initiative and helmed a beauty justice campaign to raise awareness of the effects of chemicals in beauty products on people of color, has been named VP of sustainability and impact at Credo Beauty. Brown-West doesn’t come to the clean beauty retailer unfamiliar with its business. She’s been an expert on its Clean Beauty Council since 2019.
Brown-West succeeds Mia Davis in the sustainability and impact post. Davis, who was head of environment, health and safety at Beautycounter prior to joining Credo, is spreading her wings beyond beauty. She will continue to advise Credo and Pact Collective, a recycling nonprofit it started with makeup brand MOB Beauty that has 170-plus member companies such as Sephora, Ulta Beauty, Cos Bar, Beautycounter, Ritual, Pacifica, Benefit Cosmetics, Summer Fridays and Rizos Curls.

At Credo, Brown-West’s professional interests as an engineer trained to examine systems are intertwined with and informed by her background. “We use beauty products every day on our bodies. You can’t get any more intimate than that when talking about consumer products. As a Black woman, it was more personal to me because beauty products that have typically been marketed to women of color weren’t always the ones with the best ingredients,” she says. “I had that lived experience as well in terms of, how can we improve upon these products and ensure safer products are accessible to everyone?”
While lauding Credo’s efforts to set clean beauty standards, Brown-West points out the beauty industry can enhance its data collection and reporting, sourcing and packaging practices, and knowledge about alternatives to ingredients deemed harmful. Credo has created what it calls The Dirty List of some 2,700 ingredients it doesn’t permit in the products it sells, pushed for greater openness around fragrance compounds with a framework requiring brands it carries to categorize those compounds, and instituted packaging guidelines to reduce single-use items, virgin plastic and non-recyclable materials.
“Companies are trying to put out more of their goals or ambitions, and they absolutely should be prepared to show up with the receipts.”
On packaging, Brown-West recommends the industry should move toward diminishing the amount of material per product container and higher concentrations of recycled content. Discussing data collection, she expounds, “Looking at corporate America broadly, I think we have seen some companies try and get accolades for certain goals, but not necessarily backing them up with the data or real action a year or two years after. I do think that companies are trying to put out more of their goals or ambitions, and they absolutely should be prepared to show up with the receipts in a year, two years or five years.”
Brown-West highlights Credo’s partnership with the organization ChemFORWARD on the Know Better, Do Better collaboration with Sephora, Ulta, Beautycounter and The Honest Co. to promote safer chemistry. “The hope is that will help us continue to go further in terms of safer alternatives in products where we have strong science as to the chemical hazards,” she says, emphasizing, “It’s really important to say out loud the ingredients we don’t want to see, but the flip side of that is to ensure we are avoiding regrettable substitutes.”

In its current sourcing stipulations, Credo mandates that brands on its physical and virtual shelves get documentation of their ingredients’ composition and purity, among various information. Brown-West is driven to advance sourcing traceability beyond ingredient composition and purity. She mentions brands should be asking about where their ingredients are from and the conditions of the people and ecosystems in those locales.
“Not only am I thinking about the consumers, what is available to them and how products impact their lives and health, but I’m also thinking about people along the chain with respect to raw material sourcing,” she says. “I don’t have specific goals in place yet as I am still settling in and thinking through what influence Credo has and can have in this space with our brand partners and with our industry colleagues, but I do think there is more down the road there in terms of bringing more traceability and transparency.”
“People, especially younger people, are becoming more hypersensitive to greenwashing and holding companies to account.”
Owned by private equity firm NextWorld Evergreen, 13-unit Credo will have 16 stores by the end of September with branches opening in Seattle, a first for the retailer in Washington, as well as the Los Angeles neighborhoods Venice and Silver Lake. At the moment, the retailer stocks 121 brands, including Iota, Iris&Romeo, OSEA, Westman Atelier, Le Prunier, Alpyn Beauty, Moodeaux, Goop, RMS Beauty and Arey, but it will be reducing that number. Credo’s in-house brand roster contains Exa, EleVen by Venus Williams and Follain.
Brown-West understands the difficult balance of encouraging profit-motivated companies to weigh the long-term societal and planetary implications in their decisions. She suggests involving every aspect of businesses, from procurement to marketing, in impact programs and ingraining those programs into their operations early on. In beauty, she says, “At the core is building in that philosophy from the get-go for brands and retailers and continuously trying to improve the safety and sustainability of products and having that be important in the development and growth of the business as all the other factors are that go into a business. We are still in a place with some companies where that is still see as an add-on.”

Going forward, Brown-West believes the consumer demand for companies to consider the consequences of their actions will only increase. “As we are seeing more and more the impacts of climate change and chemical pollution, and they are more frequent and tangible, people, especially younger people, are becoming more hypersensitive to greenwashing and holding companies to account for achieving their goals,” she says. “What that means for companies who are trying to do the good work is for them to be more transparent about not only their goals and their progress against them, but to be more cognizant of, do these goals match up well with your market influence? Are you focusing on the areas that your company needs to be focusing on with the global challenges that we have?”
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