A local organic business in the forefront of social responsibility creating positive impacts among the growers, producers and consumers.. but how do we preserve the beauty of Justlife?

‘We place our unwavering trust in our people, because they truly believe in what they do and will bring Justlife’s values to the next level.’ -justlife founders

Before Justlife, Blue Oasis and Raw Nature can embark on a new journey, questions were raised and debated on succession, with maintaining the companies’ culture and core values high on the list of concerns raised. Through many sleepless nights, until an eureka moment hit them that the very people they mingle with on a daily basis, sharing lunches, journeys, responsibilities, late night zoom calls, tears of joys and frustrations, ..are the very people who are already living and breathing these values.

What other better candidates to take over the reins of the companies than the very same people they have known all these years, quietly cultivating and nurturing the dreams of the founders and to actually make it happen..

They are the workers themselves, and through a workers cooperative to carry on the legacy and dreams of the founders!

To build and uphold values such as mutual respect, transparency and fairness while continuing the traditions of Justlife in building a sustainable wellbeing of our community.

A workers cooperative is where the stakeholders and shareholders are the employees of the business and is managed democratically by the employees as a collective. The profits are shared, as agreed, amongst the co-owners.

The co-workers have an equal say in the decision making process through their voting right of one vote per person. The co-workers can nominate and vote yearly for their Board of Directors to oversee the cooperative.

We are excited to share the news that out of our 40 fellow co-workers, 25 have opted in as pioneers of the Justlife Workers Co-operative. On top of that, these opt-in co-owners have elected the first term of the Board of Directors.

Sitting on the board, we have:

Chairman- Sara, 5 years employee / creative
Treasurer- Chee Keong, 15 years employee / warehouse
Secretary- Lay Hoon, 12 years employee / product venturist
Director- May Leng, 17 years employee / why not? culturist
Director- Peggy- 8 years employee / justlife culturist
Director- Shu Ning, 4 years employee / finance

Moving forward, we envision more customer participation in our business activities. Essentially, part of our existence is to ease and meet the challenges of our customers in practicing an Earth-friendly lifestyle, that goes beyond just the labels and certifications. Our product’s curation criteria remains the same with some minor enhancements. We have always maintained an associative and healthy relationship with our suppliers and hence our suppliers share our joy in this transition process and have been very supportive to these changes. To know more, we invite you to join our Discovery justlife workers co-op sessions to understand better what sort of business and culture you are supporting.

Everything is status quo, with the exception that our team collectively has a voice of who and how we wish to collaborate. It is an opportunity to diversify and expand our partners and horizons. Many of our suppliers are friends to us after so many year of business relationship. Some of them are really fun!

from left: Johannes Gutmann, founder of Sonnentor Darren, co-founder of Justlife

The workers co-operative works differently from consumer co-operative or farmers co-operative, a workers cooperative is formed for the benefit of the co-workers. Hence, only workers of the JUSTLIFE workers cooperative who fulfills the standard requirements are eligible to join as co-owners. However, we do have a patron program which includes our community in our cooperative. Stay tuned for more information on this project.

New to you? The same to us too!

The best way to predict the future is to hack our own path to the future. What better way to do this is for everyone to join us. 

This is something totally new to us, and in fact we are the first and only (for now) workers co-op in Malaysia. Your full support and patience in our conversion process to workers co-op means a lot to us. Together, we can make this through and build an improved version of JUSTLIFE 2.0 (so to speak ☺). Fasten your seatbelts and hold on to your seat and let this journey be ours to share!

A toast to the growers, the producers, the consumers and the workers!