The B Corp Studio Changing Southeast Asia’s Animation Scene
- Cecilia Hough
- 5 days ago
- 9 min read
In this feature, Thomas Dohm, co-founder of ROUGE Collective, reflects on becoming the region’s first B Corp-certified animation studio and how their work continues to spotlight community while respecting the environment. Get ready to be inspired!
Tell us about your company
ROUGE Collective is an animation studio based in Singapore, with a distributed team across Southeast Asia. My co-founder, Vann Law and I started it in 2024, after a decade each in very different corners of the industry. Vann is an animator from an entertainment and commercial background, with a long-held interest in making original Southeast Asian stories. I spent my decade in advertising, building and running creative teams inside large global agencies, including an 80-person animation hub. I learnt a lot doing it. It also left me with a clearer sense of what I wanted the next decade to be about.
We started with one question: How can we take on more meaningful animation work? There is a gap where the kind of clients we care about (NGOs, social enterprises, brands with a mission) need the visibility animation can bring, but sit outside what larger commercial agencies typically take on. The studio is in part the answer to that question. We work with a close core team and a hand-picked network of makers across the region (writers, storyboard artists, illustrators, animators, sound designers, music composers), bringing together the right people for each project. There is often an assumption that this kind of work exists on goodwill alone.
In our experience, with the right partners and conversations, it can be made sustainably, and our projects bear that out. By working consistently with the same collaborators, we're building toward something bigger: original Southeast Asian films that put our region's storytelling voices in front of wider audiences. Two co-founders from different corners of the industry, a wide regional network, and a commitment to take on animation work with organisations whose mission we believe in. That's the studio we're building.
“By working consistently with the same collaborators, we're building toward something bigger: original Southeast Asian films that put our region's storytelling voices in front of wider audiences.”
What positive change are you aiming to create through your work?
Two things, sitting in tension with each other in a useful way.
The first is in the work itself. We believe animation can move hearts in a way other media often can't. It can simplify the unfathomable, and it can dignify the small. When stories make people truly feel, those people sometimes become catalysts for the kind of change those stories were trying to evoke. Not always. But sometimes. That's the bet we're making.
The second is in how the work gets made. The animation industry, particularly in our region, hasn't always been kind to the people making it. Asia's animation sector has historically been treated as a production line for studios commissioning work from elsewhere, where artists are valued for their hands and their hours rather than their thinking. We'd like to change that in our small corner. Properly paid people, working from where they live, on projects they care about, with their cultural knowledge treated as essential rather than incidental.
We don't see entertainment and impact as opposites, and we don't think the people making either should have to be ground down to deliver the work.
What does being a B Corp mean to you, and what did the journey teach you?
Being a B Corp means we've made a public, legally binding commitment to running the business with consideration for everyone affected by it: our makers, our clients, the communities our work tries to serve, and the environment we operate in. Not just the people on the cap table.
In practice, it means we did the homework. We amended our governing documents. We wrote a Code of Conduct, a Social and Environmental Policy, and an Ethical Marketing Policy. We built a vendor screening process that asks every supplier about their labour and environmental practices. We track who's in our supply chain and where they sit demographically. And we made it transparent through independent review and verification. It also means we're now in a community of other businesses asking similar questions, which has turned out to be more useful than we expected.
We were looking for a framework to approach impact more thoughtfully, because “doing good” is easy to claim but hard to define. We also wanted to connect with others taking it seriously, people we could learn from and compare notes with.
What we learned was harder. The assessment forces you to look at parts of the business you'd otherwise gloss over. Some of those bits we genuinely improved. We're a better-run studio than we were when we started.
We also learned that measurement comes with its own gravity. There's a real tension between optimising for the score and optimising for the thing the score is meant to measure. We caught ourselves a few times reaching for changes that would lift our number without changing very much, and most of the time we caught ourselves and put the calculator down. The lesson stuck. The score is a useful prompt for the conversations a business should be having anyway. It isn't the conversation itself.
So the honest answer is: we're proud to be certified, and we hold it loosely. B Corp is a useful starting point, not an arrival. The interesting work is in what we do with it from here.
B Corp is a useful starting point, not an arrival. The interesting work is in what we do with it from here.
Can you give an example of a recent project where community impact influenced a creative decision?
Jalan Arif is a cartoon series we make about peaceful coexistence between people and Bornean elephants, in partnership with Seratu Aatai, a conservation organisation in Sabah.
Our principle on a project like this is straightforward in theory: the people who live near elephants should tell the story of living near elephants. So when we built the team, we sourced artists from Sabah first, then the rest of East Malaysia, then peninsular Malaysia, then the wider region.
In practice, it's a balancing act. We pride ourselves on craft, and we won't compromise on quality, so a maker has to combine three things at once: the right skill set, a meaningful relationship to the place, and a real connection to the subject. Those don't always overlap neatly, and the smaller the talent pool, the longer the search. But the work comes out closer to the truth, and the people whose lives the story is about see themselves in it, rather than seeing themselves explained to them.
“We pride ourselves on craft, and we won't compromise on quality, so a maker has to combine three things at once: the right skill set, a meaningful relationship to the place, and a real connection to the subject.”
How do you create economic equity for the artists you work with?
In two ways. The first is who we work with. In 2025, our supply chain was overwhelmingly Southeast Asian, with a meaningful proportion going to women, LGBTQ+ creatives, and people from ethnic or cultural minority backgrounds. We track this not because we're trying to optimise a number, but because we want to keep ourselves honest about whether the studio is doing what it says it does.
The second is how the contracts themselves are structured. On our original short film Noteless, for instance, the music contract is built around two things. The composer keeps the share of royalties and ownership that matters most to them. And every performer on the recording has to be from Southeast Asia or the diaspora. That second clause exists for a simple reason: if we say we're a studio about Southeast Asian voices, the voices on our records should reflect that. So we wrote it into the contract. A principle isn't a principle until it costs you money. A contract is one of the places where that becomes visible.
What does ‘community’ look like for your agency in 3–5 years?
Honestly, two communities at the same time. On one side, the makers. We host that community on a Discord server right now, and the intention has always been for it to be a 360-degree thing: makers sharing resources, jobs, techniques, and inspiration with each other. In practice, it's still more broadcast than exchange. We're honest about that, because the version we want is bigger and harder. A properly thriving regional network where the conversations are no longer top-down. Stronger connections with schools and platforms so we can support the next generation. More physical spaces for animation makers to find each other: screenings, talks, the kind of conversations the industry doesn't make enough room for. Some of this we'll build. Some of it will only happen if we connect what others are already doing. Either way, the ambition is the same: that in three to five years, a Southeast Asian animator looking for their people knows where to find them, and we're one of the places they look.
On the other side are the partners and clients. We'd like to grow, deliberately, a constellation of organisations that come to us because they want the kind of studio we are, rather than the cheapest or fastest option in their inbox.
If both of those communities grow into the kind of thing we hope for, then the studio sits as the bridge between them. Which is what we want it to be.
How do you approach the environmental impact as a creative studio?
We're a remote, distributed studio. No office, no daily commutes, very little business travel. By default, that means our day-to-day footprint is low compared to most studios our size.
Beyond that baseline, we hire makers locally for each project rather than flying people in, partly for cultural reasons but also because it cuts emissions on every job. Workflows are digital-first and cloud-based, so we're not burning through physical materials.
We've put the rest of our effort into the things we can actually influence. We have a Social and Environmental Policy for the studio. Our new vendor registration form asks every supplier about their environmental practices, certifications, and labour standards before we work with them. And we've put together a hazardous waste disposal annex for the countries our makers live in, which currently covers Singapore, Malaysia, Thailand, and Indonesia, with specific local facilities for batteries, e-waste, lighting, and chemicals. Most of our people work from home, and home offices generate exactly that kind of waste.
What feels achievable today vs. aspirational?
Achievable today: the operational discipline above. Picking the remote model, hiring locally, screening vendors, helping our makers dispose of waste responsibly. None of it is heroic, and all of it is within reach for any studio our size that wants it.
Aspirational: navigating the limits of the remote model honestly. We believe in the remote, distributed model, and we think it's part of where the future of creative work sits. But we're also coming to terms with something harder. For the subjective parts of an animation pipeline (colour grading, pacing, tone, "the vibe"), a video call sometimes hits a wall that an in-person conversation wouldn't. We've had projects where three remote rounds of colour notes weren't getting anywhere, until an art director drove to an editor's house and solved it in an afternoon. Eventually, you run out of ways to explain it away.
We don't have a clean answer yet. The honest aspiration is to be one of the studios that's open about where remote works, where it doesn't, and what to do at the boundary, without quietly retreating to old habits and undoing the structural benefits in the process.
For companies, organisations, or individuals that are inspired by your work, how can they get involved or collaborate with you?
Two doors are open.
If you're a maker (a writer, illustrator, storyboard artist, animator, sound designer, or music composer) based in Southeast Asia, or carrying the region with you wherever you end up, sign up to our Makers network. We're always looking. The form is on our site at withrouge.com.
If you're an organisation working on something you'd like to bring to life through animation (a non-profit, a social enterprise, a brand with a real purpose, an agency doing good), get in touch. The conversations we like best start with the question itself, before anyone has decided what the answer looks like.
And if you're just curious about how this all works, our podcast Broad Strokes of ROUGE, hosted by Ben Peace, is where we have these conversations out loud.
Anything else you would like to share with our readers?
Just one thing. What we didn't expect about getting certified was the community that came with it. Other businesses are asking similar questions, sitting in similar tensions, willing to talk about both. If this article puts us in front of more of them, then it's done its job.
Contact Thomas at: thomas@withrouge.com
Follow ROUGE Collective’s work on Instagram
At B Lab Singapore, we are building a movement of aligned and grounded business leaders who pursue purpose alongside progress. We are grateful to Thomas Dohm for sharing his insights with the B Lab Singapore team. We are constantly energised by the trailblazers in our movement who are redefining what business success looks like and pushing the boundaries of what “good” can become.
If the above spoke to you, and you are part of a business that places impact at the heart of what you do, get in touch with us to be part of the B Corp community! Connect with us, subscribe to our newsletter, and attend our upcoming events.