This announcement would be remiss if it did not begin with an enormous THANK YOU! A thank you to YOU, our customers, for sparking the initiative and offering encouragement, feedback, and excitement throughout our journey towards more sustainable practices at Sarah’s Silks. While environmental consciousness has been at the forefront of our mission for some time, this past year, fueled by the collective eco-awareness of our customers, who were reaching out to us on Instagram and Facebook asking, “why are my child’s playsilks arriving wrapped in plastic?”, we were inspired to drastically up our game and implement new practices that better reflect our goals of creating a sustainable future for Mother Earth’s children.
We are so excited to tell you about the many small ways we’ve been working towards big changes, and unveil the new project we’ve been hinting at this past week...a beautiful new line of playsilks, inspired by the natural beauty of Mother Earth’s oceans, forests, mountains, and deserts. We created these playsilks as a thank you to our customers; we hope they’ll provide an opportunity for dialogue with your little ones about environmental awareness and sustainability in a joyous and imaginative way. Each playsilk is also a thank you to the Earth, with portions of the proceeds going to corresponding environmentally-focused charities, starting with our Deep Sea playsilk which will support the Surfrider foundation.
Sarah’s Silks has grown so much over the past twenty-five years, and while we hope to continue on that trajectory, we don’t want our carbon footprint to grow with us! We realize that with every new customer we welcome and each new product we create, our ethical responsibility as a company increases. That’s why we are so excited to be working with Terra Pass, an amazing organization that leads a number of different sustainability projects all over the world. Through Terra Pass, we are able to calculate our carbon footprint, and choose which projects we want to sponsor in order to off-set our company’s carbon emissions, so that we can continue to grow without causing harm to the environment.
As a lot of you may have already noticed, we’ve been making huge strides to eliminate single-use plastic packaging in our warehouse. We appreciate all of our customers hanging in there and giving us feedback while we experimented with alternative packaging options over the past several months. As one of our wonderful customers, @graceandmeadows, pointed out when she shared a photo of her Sarah’s Silks order on Instagram, wrapped in well-wrinkled brown paper: while plastic-free options may not always be the prettiest option, the long term result of caring for the earth is always beautiful! That being said, we think we’ve settled on some packing methods that check both boxes, and we really hope you agree!
The most exciting addition to our packaging is our new custom-printed, 100% recycled plastic Sarah’s Silks mailers from EcoEnclose! The first week they arrived, everyone at the warehouse couldn’t stop talking about how exciting it would be for a young child (and, admittedly, us twenty and thirty and forty and fifty-somethings, too) to find such a joyously wrapped package in their mailbox. While we are sending most of your orders in our beautiful EcoEnclose mailers, we also needed a cushier option for our more fragile products like playclips and streamers. While not as bright as our recycled plastic mailers, we hope you like the more au natural style of our recyclable Kraft paper padded envelopes, stamped with a purple or blue Sarah’s Silks logo. We love that both of these options, while totally recyclable, are also incredibly easy to re-use again as mailing supplies!
Inside your mailer, you’ll find your Sarah’s Silks items wrapped in either 100% recycled tissue paper from EcoEnclose, recycled paper bags from PaperMart, which are made in Wisconsin, or our beautiful custom-designed, zero waste Sarah’s Silks tissue paper from No Issue Tissue Co.! Those Sarah’s Silks stickers that are holding your package together will also be zero waste soon--as soon as we run out of stock we will be transitioning to EcoEnclose for stickers with recyclable backing.
I love this post I saw on Instagram the other day by @zero.waste.ninja that says: “we don’t need a handful of people doing zero waste perfectly, we need MILLIONS of people doing it imperfectly.” Sarah’s Silks is proud to be going on this beautifully imperfect, eco-friendly journey, making mistakes along the way, seeking help and encouragement from other businesses and, most importantly, from YOU, our amazing customers! We know that the transition to zero waste doesn’t happen overnight, and instead of letting that discourage us, we’re using it as an impetus to keep asking ourselves what small changes we can make on a daily basis to invest in a more sustainable future.
If you’d like to share with us in the comments, we’d love to hear about the ways you and your family are tackling environmental awareness--messiness, imperfections and all! If you'd like to share in the journey with us on Instagram, use the hashtag #babystepsfortomorrow--we need all the encouragement and ideas we can get!
xoxo Sarah