Field Notes — March 2026
A promise is a direction taken, a self-limitation of choice. — Ursula K. Le Guin The Dispossessed 1974
About a year ago, someone asked me a question I hadn't prepared an answer for.
We were talking about NICER — the sourcing, the formulation philosophy, the precautionary principle — and they listened carefully, and then they said: "What happens to all of that if someone buys you?"
I knew the right answer. I'd given versions of it before. Something about staying true to the mission, about only accepting investment from aligned partners, about never compromising on what the brand stands for. The words were all correct. But as I heard myself saying them, I noticed something: they were a promise. And a promise is only as durable as the people making it.
That answer bothered me.
I've spent a career watching what happens to institutions with genuine founding missions. As a long-range environmental planner for Santa Barbara County, I worked alongside people who deeply believed in protecting the Gaviota Coast — and I watched the work get harder, not because the public stopped caring, but because the pressures pushing the other direction were patient, well-resourced, and showed up at every meeting. Environmental law is supposed to be changeable; that's democracy working. What's harder to defend against is something quieter: the accumulation of small decisions, each one defensible in isolation, that together redirect an institution away from what it was built to do — without a vote, without a public record, without anyone clearly responsible. That's not democratic change. That's drift. And I've watched it happen to organizations that had every intention of holding their ground.
So I know, professionally and personally, what happens to missions that exist only as statements. They survive exactly as long as the people who hold them. And then they don't.
When I started NICER, I told myself the standard things. That I would never use an ingredient I couldn't justify with peer-reviewed science. That I would source from regenerative and organic farms wherever possible. That I would never reformulate to cut costs in ways that compromised safety. These are commitments I've kept, and I intend to keep them.
But intending isn't the same as building.
The concept I needed a name for turned out to have one. I found it through Eric Ries — whose work I'd known for years, going back to his early days developing what became the Lean Startup methodology. When Eric shared the manuscript for his forthcoming book Incorruptible with me, I recognized immediately what I'd been circling around. The book is about how to build a company that can't be corrupted — not by acquisition pressure, not by investor demands, not by the ordinary drift that happens when a business grows and the original founders lose influence. I'd been thinking about this problem for NICER without having a framework for it. Reading Incorruptible gave me one. Eric has since joined NICER's advisory board, and the governance structure we've built here is, in some ways, the book's argument made concrete — implemented before the book even publishes.
His central argument is that mission protection has to be structural, not just intentional. It has to be embedded in the corporate architecture so that future leaders — people who may never have met the founder, who may have inherited the company through three rounds of investment — are still legally bound by what the company was built to do.
I had been building products this way for years without realizing I needed to build the company the same way.
NICER is now a Public Benefit Corporation — a PBC.
Most people haven't heard this term, and the ones who have often confuse it with B Corp certification. They're different things. B Corp is a certification, granted and renewed by a nonprofit called B Lab, based on an assessment of a company's social and environmental practices. It's valuable. It's also revocable. A board can decide not to recertify. The certification can lapse. It exists outside the corporate structure, which means it can be removed from the corporate structure.
A Public Benefit Corporation is a legal entity type. The mission is written into the charter — the foundational document that defines what the company is. Under Delaware PBC law, directors don't just have a fiduciary duty to shareholders. They're legally required to balance three things: the financial interests of stockholders, the interests of stakeholders affected by what the company does, and the specific public benefit that the company exists to provide.
That last clause matters. NICER's charter states that we exist "to advance human and environmental health through science-backed personal care products rooted in the landscapes where they are made — formulated using the precautionary principle, sourced from local and regenerative suppliers wherever possible, and produced with minimal environmental footprint through short supply chains, packaging minimalism, and carbon-conscious commerce." That's not a marketing line. It's a legal obligation that a future board can't optimize away without amending the charter — which requires a stockholder supermajority. We also have a dual-class stock structure that gives me, as founder, protective voting rights over mission-critical decisions. And we've reserved equity for a mission foundation, following a model Eric describes in the book — the same architecture used by Novo Nordisk, which has operated as a foundation-owned company for nearly a century without ever drifting from its purpose.
I'm not describing all of this because it's legally interesting. I'm describing it because it took me a long time to understand that the most important design decisions for a company aren't the formulation choices or the sourcing relationships or even the brand philosophy. They're the governance structures — the ones that determine whether any of those choices survive contact with the pressures that will inevitably arrive.
There's a version of NICER where I could have chosen to stay an LLC indefinitely. It's simpler. It's cheaper. It keeps all options open.
But "keeping all options open" is exactly the problem. Every option you keep open in a business is an exit for the values you said you'd protect. The precautionary principle is meaningful because it forecloses options — it says these compounds are not going in regardless of cost or convenience. That's the whole point. A governance structure that protects the mission works the same way: it closes doors that should be closed, not just while I'm watching, but after.
When I filed as a Public Benefit Corporation, I wasn't adding a credential. I was finishing a sentence I'd started when I first looked at that product in the drugstore and thought: not this, not for my family, not for the people who trust us with their skin.
The products we make are rooted in a place, formulated with restraint, and backed by science. That's the work. The PBC structure is what makes sure the work continues.
A promise is a starting point. A structure is what holds it.
— James Birchler, Founder + Chief Scientist
NICER is a Delaware Public Benefit Corporation and 1% for the Planet member. Every product is handcrafted in small batches near Park City, Utah. Every formulation is built on the precautionary principle: only ingredients proven safe and effective by peer-reviewed science. Learn more at feelnicer.com.