A sustainable future depends on the actions we take now, so it is the responsibility of every company to make sustainability and growth one in the same. At Cedreo, we are actively working on figuring out the size of the problem but also taking concrete action and calculating their impact to create a sustainable business that works for our employees, our clients, the community and the planet.

 

Cedreo’s Online 3D Home Design Software: From Start-up to Saas Editor

Cedreo's 3D home building software helps builders and designers save time and improve client communications. In less than 2 hours, our clients can design an entire home, create a floor plan , and render it in 3D. 

Cedreo was founded in 2005 to provide a 3D product visualization solution. In the beginning, the company specialized in space planning in order to offer a sales tool to the home building industry to help clients visualize their new home. At that time, only civil engineers and architects were drawing floor plans and creating 3D renderings for projects that had already been sold.

Cedreo grew to become the market leader in new home construction software in its home market of France. In 2019, the company evolved to a SaaS model in order to serve the whole housing industry, worldwide.

We are a team of 35 people and growing: product developers, computer graphics designers, salespeople, customer service, admin and marketing. We are working to provide home builders, remodelers, interior designers, real estate developers, with the best possible solution to their 3D needs. Our headquarters are in France, and we recently opened two additional offices in Atlanta, United States and Munich, Germany - to locate sales teams closer to many of our users. 

Cedreo is a company and software with ambitious sustainable growth objectives. The team is working hard to deliver a fast and easy-to-use product to help you grow our client businesses with a responsible objective.  At Cedreo, employees, customers and the ecosystem are a key factor when making strategic decisions. Customer satisfaction is key to the ambitious international development but it is impossible to keep growing without the best employee satisfaction management. Symmetry of attentions is the backbone of Cedreo’s principle: provide the best experience to the employees to provide the best experience to the users.

Committing to a More Sustainable Path

Two years ago, the decision was made by the management, with major input from employees, to make the effort to combine the goals of providing the best 3D home design software with positive action on becoming as sustainable as possible, both socially and environmentally. 

Our 3D home design software gave the company a head start on our sustainable journey, given that some environmental benefits are built into the product. From 2D floor plans to the photorealistic 3D renderings, Cedreo allows home builders, remodelers, interior designers and contractors to help their clients envision their project before it is built, providing smoother communication and faster sales. Using Cedreo, housing professionals don’t need to print documents or use paper anymore to present their conceptual design to their clients. They can show the floor plan and the 3D renderings on their own laptop and even send a link to a cloud storage where all deliverables can be accessible by the client.

Cedreo is 100% online, so there is no box to deliver and nothing to download and update. Also, users don’t have to buy the latest, most powerful computers to create photorealistic 3D renderings. All visualization calculations are made on our rendering farms. 

We’re happy to share our sustainable progress to date, and we continue to think of and discuss additional steps we can take to improve further.   
 

Sustainable Growth is a Common Responsibility

At Cedreo, CSR (Corporate Social Responsibility) is the duty of every employee. Indeed, a healthy ecosystem leads to healthy company growth. We see that companies with strong CSR policies see greater performance thanks to a higher engagement from their employees.

All employees at Cedreo can take up to 6 days per year to participate in different CSR projects. It is part of our values to take care of the ecosystem, not only environment but social and territorial as well. Team members participate in actions according to their interests and willingness.

We decided to educate all employees on climate change in order to make sure that everyone is aware of the need to change behavior to reach our objective. Workshops will be organized very soon with The Climate Collage to go further on climate change solutions.

What does it mean in terms of concrete actions?

 

Tracking and Reducing Waste

The first step was to calculate the waste created by the team and company to identify the areas where we could have an impact.

We started sorting waste through a compost bin (used by their green fingered employees), battery collection, and separate glass, plastic and paper recycling. Every bin is weighed to and tracked in order to identify the areas where it is mandatory to reduce waste.

We stopped plastic bottle usage, and in fact any 1 time plastic usage within the company. We replaced it with local fresh juice delivered in glass bottles, and metal flasks for tap water. From still and sparkling water, to fruit juice, we are saving 10,000  bottles every year!
 

Carbon Emission Reduction

Carbon emissions are the greatest challenge we are facing and we know they can be significantly reduced by taking some key actions which will have a big impact on our footprint. In 2020, we have reduced our carbon emissions by 22 tons in comparison to 2019. 

Cedreo recently compared hosting companies and changed for the most sustainable one in order to reduce the impact of the product usage. We also changed our electricity provider to a local one Enercoop, the leading green energy supplier in France.

Since January 2019, employees have been allowed to work from home up to 4 days a week to avoid car emissions commuting every day. Covid-19 of course accelerated the adoption from the employees. It has allowed us to reduce the emissions by 6 tons in comparison to 2019. 

Our annual retreat is less exotic in terms of location but much more responsible! It is not too far from Nantes, the headquarters, so only employees from our branch offices travel. This would be a reduction of 16 tons of carbon. During the retreat, a special workshop attended by all employees is organized with the goal of educating everyone on CSR issues. 

Moreover, the way we travel for business has changed, prioritizing trains over planes when visiting clients and potential clients

In addition, we now offer to train new users online thanks to 1 to 1 training or small groups instead of flying to the office to be face to face, which could lead to a reduction of 13 tons CO2, depending on the adoption of this method by the clients.

Carbon Emission Compensation

We must reduce carbon emissions, but for certain activities it is very difficult to reduce emissions. We need to compensate for these activities. Cedreo wants to offset waste production.

We have chosen to focus on 1 of the 2 carbon sequestration methods: funding associations that plant or preserve trees which have a fast impact. Several studies have been released and trees remain the most efficient way to sequester carbon.

This year, we are contributing to 2 projects which will have a long term global impact as well as educating the local populations: 

• Protect and preserve the existing primary rainforest in Peru: Envolvert

• Grow new urban forest in France and educate pupils about nature protection: Minibigforest

Social Responsibility Time to Help People Discover a New Workplace

Sustainable growth is not only about tackling the environment. It is also social. 2 main actions take place every year (temporarily suspended in 2020 because of the covid-19) at Cedreo in order to give people the chance to discover a Saas company:

• Young trainees: A company has an important role to play in the professional integration of young people from at risk areas and provide them with valuable and interesting introduction to the workplace. For most young people arriving at Cedreo, it is the first work experience and they can discover several roles in just one week, spending a couple of hours to a full day with a member of each department. 

• People at a career crossroads: Cedreo and other local companies organize workshops on specific themes (elevator pitch, sales negotiation, online marketing, IT development…) in order to help unemployed people discover roles and learn from several companies.  
   

What’s Next?

We work closely with other local companies to exchange ideas to find the best way forward to make our businesses as sustainable as possible. But we also help others to start taking action by sharing with them what worked and what didn’t so they can avoid wasting time and resources on dead ends. 

A Positive Impact Committee has just been created to set an efficient and sincere strategy, with concrete goals and actions for 2021 with volunteer employees. This will be an essential milestone to sustain the path taken over the last 2 years. 

Actions on Supplies Management and Digital Activities

Our next key action will be focused on supplies management and digital activities to reduce their overall carbon emissions. Emails, video-conferencing as well as other solution providers must be optimized to reduce the impact.

We have already created a list of validated suppliers available for all employees so they can easily know where to buy something and remain socially responsible. 

An initiative to donate electronic devices such as laptops and computers will be set up in the near future.

BCorp Certification 

Having a positive impact on the ecosystem is essential for Cedreo, so we have decided to structure our actions to meet the highest standards of certified B Corporations. This is a company objective.  This means improving, tracking and writing about all the actions which have already been taken and taking new ones in order to achieve the environmental and social performance required.

We started working to become a Certified B Corp in order to organize the decisions and actions around CSR issues. The whole team is pursuing this objective to get the certification by the end of 2020. 

Conclusion:

Cedreo’s team knows that we are taking first steps and that our objectives are ambitious. However, our new Positive Impact Committee, together with our leadership team and employees are swinging into action to move in this direction.  Taking inspiration from others and inspiring us is essential to widen the impact of all actions. 

We want to explore any possible way to reduce the carbon footprint and to have a positive impact on the population and home building industry. So if this resonates with you and you want to communicate with us, don’t hesitate to reach out at: contact@cedreo.com.  We are happy to share our process and progress, and we also look forward to learning from the examples other companies can share as well.  

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