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Sustainability Requires Transparency
From the outset, we made a commitment to ourselves to continually try and improve every step in our process from designer - to - manufacturer - to - our customer (and back again if necessary) to be more sustainable.
We’re not preaching about our own personal goals or our commitment to achieving them, we’re not claiming to be better than everyone else, we’re just determined to make every effort to ensure that our vision comes at a “measured and sustainable” cost, both to the environment and ourselves. It doesn’t happen overnight, and it doesn’t happen by doing just one thing, it comes by continually re-evaluating every little step and trying to make it better and in some cases doing it differently and transparently.
We all know that e-commerce has transformed the world we live in, it provides the consumer with choice and convenience on an unrivalled level. The truth is, the convenience that we now expect, comes at a price, both financial and environmental. Shipping and return costs are an integral part of the overall cost of any e-commerce business and trying to juggle, and in some cases, hide that number, has become the “elephant in the room” for e-commerce businesses.
Let’s be honest, “free” shipping doesn’t exist. Or at least, we haven’t been able to find a courier that will deliver our parcels worldwide for free! As a business you have two choices if you want to offer free shipping, you can look back up the supply chain to your manufacturer and squeeze their margin to an unsustainable and in some cases unethical level (which has far-reaching implications) or you can go down the chain and hide the cost from the customer.
Of course, we could very easily hide the cost of shipping in the price of our garments, charge a little extra on each piece and offer free shipping to every customer. However, we believe that only encourages impulse purchasing, which actually leads to increased returns, which results in millions of unnecessary journeys for individual parcels impacting the environment. We’re also not comfortable with some customer’s subsidising the shipping costs of other customer's. We believe the fairest way, is to allow each customer to see the real price of our garments and separately, the real cost of shipping their actual order to them, so they can then consider that cost of convenience for themselves before making their purchase.
There will undoubtedly be occasions when a piece is retuned because it doesn’t fit right or feel right when you try it on and that’s fine. But please just bear in mind, you haven’t had to get in the car, drive to the store, find a parking space, pay for parking, and then drive home again.
The part we try to play in the shipping & returns of our parcels is that we are obsessive in checking each and every item before packing it to ensure that each piece arrives to our customer undamaged and not faulty in order to minimise the number of return journeys.
We don’t take a margin on shipping, and we also pay the additional premium to send each one of our packages as “Climate Neutral”, meaning we offset transport related carbon emissions on each individual package.
If our transparency ultimately leads to fewer sales, we have to be okay with that! We’re not competing with fast fashion or chasing high volumes. We want our pieces to be considered purchases, pieces that you really want to buy, really want to keep, and really love wearing over and over.
Thank you for taking the time to read this and we really do hope you love the pieces you choose to purchase.
Aavelle