This piece is an excerpt from our 2025 Fall Digtial Catalog. View the entire catalog for more features like this.
If there’s one ‘hot take’ guaranteed to get us canceled, it’s this: ‘sustainable’ is a feel-good label that sounds nice, but in-reality means absolutely nothing.
If you’ve watched that Netflix documentary The Shopping Conspiracy, then you probably understand why we think this.
Businesses slap the word across their products & services like a magic spell.
A plastic bottle gets a green label and suddenly it’s ‘sustainable’. A clothing company swaps out one fabric and markets an entire line as ‘planet-friendly’. But when you peel back the curtain, the reality of what’s going on behind the scenes of these businesses is usually the opposite: overproduction, hidden waste, sketchy materials, and supply chains that don’t tell the full story.
That’s not sustainability—it’s marketing.
Many of these practices are widespread across the retail industry—whether in technology, fashion or home goods. Yet, the scale of waste and pollution they generate is staggering, often far beyond what the average person realizes:
Discarded Returns
- ~ 30% of what is bought online is returned; of those returns, 25% end up in the waste stream (Business Insider).
Inventory Destruction
- A 2021 investigation in an Amazon UK warehouse found over 130,000 items marked for destruction in a single week (Greenpeace).
- In 2018, Richemont, the owner of Cartier, Piaget, and Baume & Mercier, admitted that in an effort to keep products out of the hands of unauthorized sellers, it had destroyed about $563 million worth of watches over two years (The Guardian).
Oversupply + Waste
- As much as 40% of all clothes made every year fall into oversupply (i.e., they don’t get sold), an estimated ~ 60 billion items (Eco-Stylist).
- Annual clothing waste per capita is estimated at ~ 95.7 lbs in rich countries (UniformMarket).
Let’s take a look at a few examples.
See the irony?
- In 2021, the total waste generated by Apple was 52,490 tons, an increase of 14.8% over 2020 (Global Data)
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Burberry reportedly destroyed ~$36.8 million worth of its own unsold merchandise in 2018 (Vox).
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A 2022 class-action lawsuit alleges that Maybelline waterproof mascaras contain detectable levels of PFAS substances that are not disclosed on the label. PFAS are highly persistent in the environment and in human bodies, and have been linked to various health risks (Class Action).
Actions speak louder than words.
Shop Small, Reduce Waste
That’s why we’ve chosen to stay away from the word sustainable. Not because we don’t care about the planet, but because the word has been so stretched, twisted, and over-used that it now feels hollow.
Our business is simply about choosing authenticity over marketing gimmicks and transparency over meaningless buzzwords.
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Items are crafted in small batches or even made-to-order, instantly reducing oversupply and excessive waste.
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Items are crafted with high-quality raw materials, resulting in less product defects, fewer returns, and an overall superior item that you’ll hopefully love for years to come.
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Returns are not disposable; we carefully track any return, check the item’s condition, and restock it into inventory to ensure that the product can be loved by its next customer.
And that’s a promise we’ll always stand behind, no green label required.
