August 4, 2025
At B Local, our focus is amplification, collaboration, and supporting fellow B Corps with a mandate to do good as we do well.
Barrett and Welsh is the next in our Spotlight series with a goal to promote B Local member businesses, as well as bolster greater community through shared learning and experiences.
Talk to us about your WHY. Why a purpose driven business and why the pursuit of B Corp?:
We use branding and advertising to create inclusion for racialized immigrants and other racialized/marginalized Canadians.
Though racialized minorities account for just over 30% of the Canadian population, brands typically invest less than 5% of their marketing budgets to communicate with these communities in the languages of their choice, in the media they prefer or in ways that are culturally appropriate. This further marginalizes these communities. They find it difficult to gain access to housing, funds, opportunities, employment, education, healthcare, and loans.
Our work dismantles barriers and creates access to products and services for the marginalized. We help our clients connect and engage with these audiences on a deeper level, by being insightfully empathetic, culturally sensitive and linguistically comprehensible.
Because our culturally resonant branding and advertising addresses underserved minorities so effectively, it massively improves their awareness of products and services and reduces their inability to access them.
Is there a B Corp or B Corp leader that you look up to? Explain.
Jeff Ward of Animikii is a constant inspiration. As an Indigenous business leader in the tech world, he is unwavering in his commitment to Indigenous principles in business and to the idea that love for our planet and for each other can and should inform business praxis.
What does being a B Corp mean to you? To your team? To your customers?:
We are certified by the Canadian Aboriginal and Minority Supplier Council as a 100% minority owned and led company. The work we do springs primarily from who we are—a company led by excluded minorities who use creativity to produce inclusion for racialized and other equity-denied minorities. When we became a B Corp, we realized that we were not as alone as we had feared — that there were others out there who shared our values and vision; we had found our tribe. Our team is lifted by a shared sense of purpose and motivated by the impact their/our work has on the world around us and the communities we come from.
As a local Ontario business, how do you engage with and support your local community? Can you share any recent initiatives or partnerships that highlight your community involvement?
Just two out of a long list:
The Tartan Turban Secret Readings
Since 2017, Barrett and Welsh has hosted The Tartan Turban Secret Readings in its office space. This reading series supports established and emerging writers who identify themselves as Black, Indigenous or People of Colour and who have few such platforms to present their words and voices. All who celebrate Canada’s visible diversity and indigenous heritage may read. Agency co-founder Gavin Barrett founded and co-curates the series which has gone on to become one of the most well-attended and highly regarded reading series in the country.
We host an annual e-waste drive to help our fellow small businesses dispose of e-waste in partnership with the Electronic Recycling Association.
