About Three Bears Tea, SPC

Established in June 2020, Three Bears Tea, a Washington State Social Purpose Corporation (SPC), offers a curated selection of teas and teaware.

Our mission

Three Bears Tea works to bring you teas we believe are prime examples of their genres and worthy of drinking and collecting. We only sell teas we personally drink and collect and believe represent good value: high quality for their price. As an SPC, we deliver on our responsibility to do business in a way that benefits the social and environmental good.

What is a "Social Purpose Corporation"?

Social Purpose Corporations (SPC) are a type of for-profit corporation in Washington State that are empowered to pursue social benefit and charitable goals. In that respect, SPCs function like a hybrid of for-profit and nonprofit corporations.

Unlike standard for-profit corporations, SPCs are legally empowered to pursue profit while operating to promote the positive effects of - and minimize the negative effects of - the corporation’s activities upon the corporation’s employees, suppliers or customers; the local, state, national or world community; or the environment.

While this may seem possible for any for-profit company to do, standard for-profit corporations have a legal obligation to maximize profits for shareholders. Even if they want to have a big positive impact, their legal responsibility to make as much money for their shareholders as possible means they often can't, or can't do as much, without the threat of investor litigation if it negatively affects their investors' returns.

What social purposes does Three Bears Tea support?

We at Three Bears Tea chose to incorporate as an SPC because it empowers us to do business more ethically. We commit to:

• Ethical, environmentally friendly packaging. Wherever possible, we use post-consumer recycled packaging and industrially compostable packaging. We avoid noncompostable plastics wherever possible. Currently, 100% of our packing and packaging materials is commercially compostable. What does that mean? Read more about our planet-friendly packaging here.
• Funding environmental charities. Each quarter, we choose one charity to receive 20% of our net profits for that quarter. We hope that, as we increase our scale, we can increase the percentage of our charitable giving. We also enable our customers to make an additional donation at checkout, with 100% of those monies going to that quarter's charity.