Building an Eco-Friendly Brand Is Hard

This is a shout-out to all the other businesses like ours trying to grow a brand while having as little impact on the earth as possible. With January being the time to commit to doing better in the coming year, we hope this article finds a few of you out there who will consider rewarding companies like ours for trying our best year-round. 

Building a sustainable brand is tough for any business. But, for a small one, it’s especially brutal.  This often means sacrificing profits in order to maintain our commitment to the environment. And, during an economic downturn, you can imagine how that only magnifies the many challenges. We thought covering “headlights” would be difficult, but trying to do it sustainably has been the tallest of tasks. 

One of the biggest is finding sustainable materials. It's getting harder and harder to find fabrics that are made without harming the environment. And when we do find them, they often come at a higher cost. The second is production. We want to make sure our products are made in Los Angeles, but that limits the resources we have to work with. 

Even our shipping packages involve environmental consideration and difficult decisions. We actually get complaints sometimes that our packaging isn’t “pretty enough”. Trying to use recycled materials and do away with the unnecessary tissue paper can be seen as us being cheap. The irony is that much of our minimalist packaging efforts are actually more expensive. 

Sometimes it can be really frustrating to stay the course. Especially when competing with brands that don’t have the same mission. It’s not easy to make sustainable choices when they are almost always more difficult or costly. Thanks for letting us rant and we hope you will think twice about your purchasing decisions this year and choose to shop the brands you know are trying their best with the resources they have.