First off, we’re back from Japan and, yes, it was an amazing, life-affirming/-altering experience we’d highly recommend to everyone. We’ll be using these pages in the coming weeks to outline a kind of guide for vegan-friendly, fun-friendly travel in Tokyo, Kyoto, and in between, but, in the meantime, we wanted to let you know that we’ve got a new batch of our Kindness Collection shirts that we’ve just released.
The shirts—first announced a year and a half back—are our holistic answer to animal-friendly messaging in the all-too-welcome but often over-saturated pro-vegan marketplace of today. When we first considered designing creating a line of shirts, we decided we couldn’t in good conscience simply slap some illustrations and slogans on the cheapest shirt we could find (which, admittedly, would be the most lucrative move) and ignore work conditions and environmental impact while espousing the rights of animals. It seemed like a narrow-minded approach at this point in our lives and the life of our company; in short, we would have felt like hypocrites.
So we sought out a local apparel-maker here in Los Angeles—one with an eye on minimizing environmental impact while supporting its workers—and we found Groceries Apparel. Groceries is not only committed to a fair workplace and eco-friendly materials and production, they also have an eye on quality and a deep catalog of products to choose from. What’s more, they’re a small, locally run business, like ours, with similar values that just mesh well with our own.
This run of shirts—like the last—is made of non-GMO, organic cotton and/or poly that’s produced by processing recycled plastic bottles and it’s all cut and sewn just south of downtown LA, in a central factory that also serves as Groceries’ HQ and offices. We also have the shirts screen-printed locally, just south of the 10.
All of this means more expensive shirts…but it also means producing something that we can stand behind with clear hearts. None of this is meant to disparage others in the same field doing things differently at all—again, the marketplace is so huge right now, there’s room for all kinds of approaches; this is just the one we feel most comfortable taking.
So we encourage you—if you’re local to LA or NYC—to swing by MooShoes, who carries the shirts, to check them out (give us a few days to get them over to New York; we’re tagging and sending as soon as we finish these next few paragraphs) or take a look at them over at mooshoes.com.
Also, how did we get through this whole post without mentioning our reverence for Skate or Die!?
