Hi! Are you new to our community here? Welcome! A little bit about us - we’re a small but mighty longtime second generation family-owned and -operated consignment shop. Our ties to our neighbors and community is strong, and we take our role as a small business with values seriously. It sometimes comes as a surprise to folks who have just discovered us in the last couple years to see that our social media account contains political and issues-focused reposting/sharing. It is interesting for us to look back at this shift in intentionality and remember the major impetus that was 2020 - when a shift in perspectives was unavoidable.
COVID chaos, anxiety brought to all new heights, and the revolutionizing protests after the murder of George Floyd were just a few reasons we felt a calling to bring intention to our business. Since our youth, activism has been a big part of the every day. Before 2020, our personal views and professional conduct was kept separate. It felt scary, inappropriate, and potentially unnecessary to join in and align our business with the shift in accountability and new narratives. Business was already so fragile with the COVID recession. Would we lose our customers who disagreed with us? Or alienate customers and followers who simply looked to distract themselves from the harshness of current events? Would we say or post the wrong thing to our growing following, and potentially have to issue public apologies? Well, to look back and answer those initial anxieties: yes, all of those things happened. And yet, our following had sometimes dipped but now has mostly grown because we see so many of you out there feeling these same sentiments and yearning for change. We refuse to allow fear of embarrassment or failure to interfere with our progressive values toward this change. Those missteps along the way have been opportunities for us to improve ourselves and try to do better, because that’s what you do when open yourself up to learning and growing. And to the customers we lost because they disagreed with our views? We’re grateful for the opportunity to have served up an alternative view to apathy, fragility, and that deep-seated fear. Whether views align or not, the hope is always that folks may open their minds to another (more empathetic) way of thinking. There are more important things than attempting to please everyone by keeping this light and disconnected.
Frankly, after all that was being brought to light, it just felt wrong to continue business as usual. We are mothers, partners, sisters. Family is everything to us. When something as simple as empathy for others comes into play, it is near impossible to see so much suffering and not do a damn thing about it. We are a small but mighty business, and we have some privilege in this world. We feel, as white people benefitting from our white supremacist society, that we have a duty to use our privilege to uplift others and be part of positive change. Even though things seem so much worse now than ever before, rolling over and giving up never feels like an option.
Between individual donations and with support from our customers and community, we have donated over $5,700 to various organizations and progressive causes since 2020. And the statistics are true – small businesses do in fact put a good percentage of our earnings back into the local community. Same with you – we see you, our devoted and intentional customers, consciously contributing to the circularity of the local economy. We truly believe in voting with our dollars. We ended ties with major suppliers Uline (ultra-conservative political contributions) and Amazon (obviously). We now choose smaller, local suppliers for our operational and retail supply needs. Herkimer and Ben’s Bread first, Starbucks and Panera never. We buy used technology and furnishments as much as possible. We hire locally for services like graphic design, accounting, signage, and more.
Is there room for improvement? Always. In 2020, we set an intention to hire more BIPOC staff and we have not been as successful with this as we had initially strived for. We can buy more frequently from BIPOC-owned businesses. We can pay our Real Rent to the Duwamish Tribe on whose land we benefit from more consistently. Though we’ve made many shifts toward reducing our resource consumption and eliminating plastic and waste, we have not fully reached our goals in that area. But we hope to continue a path toward improvement – not just as a business, but as citizens of the world.
Thank you for reading this post and having an interest in this topic. The sentiment is strong here and these thoughts on our experience with this subject just felt like they needed a home! Lastly, to all our customers, consignors, friends and supporters who stuck by us during pandemic turmoil and even told their friends about us to lend us more support – damn, we feel so grateful for you!