Who knew two ice cream guys could provoke so much inner searching?
I’ve been reading Ben & Jerry’s Double Dip, which has me thinking that Blonde Chicken
Boutique can have a postive impact, in more ways than just offering sustainable, earth-friendly yarns. While I’m working all this out internally, I’ll start with why I chose to make my business about sustainability and fair-trade.
When I first started planning and researching the business plan, I already had the name (see this) and had done enough research to decide on selling handpainted yarn. I searched for wholesale suppliers of undyed yarn and I found it was very difficult to get an account without making a huge order. More than that, as I researched fibers and suppliers, I learned that I didn’t agree with a lot of common business practices of both large production farmers and yarn manufacturing. The more I looked into it, the more disturbed I became.
It’s one thing to buy yarn with my own money, within my (very small) budget. It’s another altogether to order hundreds of dollars of yarn and try to market it to others. I felt that I and, by proxy, my business had a responsibility to make sure the money customers spent at Blonde Chicken Boutique was being used for something good, something healthy for the world, for the fiber animals and for the industry (and those who labor in it). I could not propogate the injustices (and inhumanity) I had found out about on such a large scale. I had to find alternative sources, or forget the idea altogether.
It was at this point in the planning that I said “Woah.” This is big.
And it was. Looking for ethical, earth-friendly yarn suppliers made the start-up process even more difficult. In order to start providing ethical yarns, I lowered my expectations of how many yarns I would start out with, feeling that the value of the few would outweigh any doubts about lack of selection. I’m sure that being dedicated to being a socially-conscious business is the best course of action. In fact, it’s the only way I could operate.
So there we have it: I opened Blonde Chicken Boutique with two sustainable, bio-degradable, fair-trade produced yarns and 1 organic animal fiber yarn that supports a co-op of indigenous people. But it doesn’t end there.
There’s so much more to making the business more eco-friendly: office practices (ink, paper, recycling), dyeing (some dyes emit harmful toxins into the water supply), packaging (tags, bags, mailing)–all things I hadn’t really thought about until this book.
I think I’ll go have a pint (of ice cream) while I do some more reading!
