black friday

and other dark things.

The most wonderful time of the year! Time to undrink the kool-aid!

As predictable as our exhaustions are long, November brings a flurry of questions about the sale period.

We’ve never participated in Black Friday, yet every year we feel the pulls and tugs toward the percentage signs.

And every year, we resist.

What started as a day of temporary discounts has become a day of temporary greed with far-from-temporary impacts.

It’s stretched from one day to thirty, with pre-Black Friday discounts bleeding into Cyber Monday (genuinely, what does that mean?) and any post-hoc, festive chaos.

The crux of Black Friday is consumption. Its purpose is to encourage shopping at a pace set by impulsivity. It’s supposed to be fast, unthinking, overwhelming, exhausting and excessive.

It’s supposed to feel like it’s all too much, and the cure can be added to cart.

This is all totally antithetical to our MO as a brand that moves very slowly, where we’re always trying to balance the environmental cost of what we do with the joy of fashion. It’s in our best interests to sit out, and it’s also in our customers’ best interests to keep things as manageable and small as we can.

We’ve spent years trying to find a pace more conducive to comfort, creativity and conscience.

When we preach low impact and low waste principles to reduce our footprint, it doesn’t make sense to contribute to an event that exists to encourage unchecked shopping.

To cave to the tension of the industry would be to become pinned beneath to the pillars of consumption, none of which tend to resonate with us.

This isn’t necessarily a boycott or protest - it’s business as usual over here, pursuing the same ethos that we do every day.

But is that pursuit a privilege? Is acting according to ideology a pipe dream?

With credit, thanks and love to the current rowdy landscape, I reserve a level of sympathy for brands on the smaller side just wanting to be heard. Participating in one of the most fruitful sale periods of the year has become less of a choice with each passing November, and participating is almost a survival tool for some.

With that in mind, the problem was never small, careful-footed brands or customers needing affordable clothing; it was always the big retailers making a dime off real people’s afflictions.

Its these fast fashion corporates that have trained us to devalue the craft of making clothing to the point where we expect every style to be available at every price point at every whim.

We then expect a cheap garment to be discounted further, forgetting that each individual piece we buy is the result of careful work by skilled hands, taking time and artisanship honed over years of experience.

The old quality over quantity adage has nothing on late stage capitalism.

The idea of owning only what we need has nothing on Black Friday.

Even if we wanted to, we don’t have the stock or the margins to discount our catalogue.

Most of our pieces are made using deadstock fabrics, which means there’s already a physical limit on how much we can make. We then have self-imposed quantities as to how much of each category and style we create, and we’re only interested in designing genuine, quality staples that can we worn and loved indefinitely.

As part of the fun, we’re usually playing with different textiles, trims, bells and whistles, which can vary drastically in price. If we were to price everything by an objective formula, our pieces would be far too expensive for our customers to justify.

If we’re going to balance considered design and ethical manufacturing while also maintaining a reasonable price point, there just isn’t room to discount for a sales event that doesn’t make sense to us to begin with.

Resistant and abstaining or persistent and participating: whichever camp you fall into, shop carefully, wear well, love hopelessly.