As we start a new year, we want to share our sustainability goals with you and how, we as a business, are striving to lessen our environmental impact and how we're working on improving our personal practices as we strive to be better for our environment.
The recent and ongoing fires in Australia has left our country, and the world, heartbroken. Mother Nature is crying out for help and while we need to share our love and thoughts for those affected, we also need to act and make changes if we're going to make an actual difference and reduce our environmental footprint.
At The UNDONE we've always focused on providing our customers with choices to buy consciously and reduce wasteful consumption, and this continues to be at the core of our business. We firmly believe that when you eliminate colourful trend items and focus on minimal, classic pieces, you buy less, wear the items you buy more often, keep items for longer, and notice the feeling of needing something new, simply for the sake of newness, is reduced.
We want to help you build a wardrobe that functions as you need it to, without the excess.
However, we’re not perfect, and any clothing production, such as that created by a physical or online store, has a social and environmental impact. So we’ve made a list of areas we’re proud of and areas we want to focus on to improve this year. Sharing this will allow you, our customers, to keep us in check on these goals.
We also welcome all feedback, ideas and suggestions on how we can work on being a more environmentally friendly store. Additionally, if you know or love any sustainable and local brands that you would like to see on The UNDONE please let us know. You can email us at info@theundone.com
What we're proud of:
- Encouraging our consumers to buy less but to buy well. Your purchases from The UNDONE can be worn again and again, season after season due to the high quality classic designs we invest in.
- We have eliminated jewellery brands that mass produce and focus on designers that hand-make their jewellery.
- We've incorporated environmental packaging options at checkout, allowing you to choose between a recyclable cardboard box or a compostable satchel depending on your personal recycling habits.
- You can search the online store by Natural Materials and items locally Made in Australia by using the filters on the site.
What we want to improve:
- Reducing the purchase of items made with polyester, nylon and other synthetic materials. We understand our position in the supply chain can have a critical impact on what designers end up producing and what our customers buy. Not only are these materials almost impossible to break down if they end up in landfill, but unfortunately when washing these types of materials the micro plastics from the fabric end up in our waterways and we need to work on reducing this.
- Buying smarter. Our buying team is constantly evaluating our designers and what product you purchase from us. If we have excess stock after a certain time, we simply need to buy less.
- Sourcing more sustainable packaging options. We understand that the dyeing of our signature black boxes, and the use of black tissue paper looks beautiful but it isn’t as good for the environment so we are looking at moving this to a more natural option, along with the use of biodegradable stickers, tape and labels.
- Moving away from printed invoices and sending only a digital copy.
- A lot of our stock that arrives in from designers comes wrapped in plastic, which is reused by our warehouse team as much as possible season after season. However we don’t want brands to wrap them in plastic in the first place, and we need to educate our brands on how we'd like to receive product and suggest alternative practices.
- Fast delivery is convenient and expected from our customers, but doesn’t need to be used for every purchase. Choosing a slower shipping option has a smaller carbon footprint, and we need to work on educating our customers about this.
Education
We try to keep ourselves educated on best practices in the retail sector, and have found the following podcast resources particularly helpful and interesting. If you wished to look into this for yourself we can recommend: