Business Tip of the Week- Sourcing ethical materials

Materials. From the french word, 'merde'. The Latin 'mater'. The piglatin 'aterialsmay'.


They are what we use to make our crap. We grow our beads and mold our yarn to create the most lovely little things that hopefully others will find cool enough to pay us for. Like a poet uses words or a prostitute uses a condom, we use clay and fabric.


So it is only natural to want to insure our materials are of the greatest quality and sourced as humanely as possible. After all people who buy handmade want ethically created items otherwise they could just go buy stuff at Target.


Then again no material is sourced without an impact. Even if you grow your own soap, it is still sucking up valuable molecules from the environment. You think yarn comes out of a box? No! A seed is planted and baby yarns are harvested to get the finest and softest skeins. We are killing baby yarns to make the hats that the buyers want.


Remember, matter can neither be created nor destroyed. So you really aren't destroying anything regardless of what you use. Unless you are god, the molecules you rearrange in the creation of your own items will continue to be rearranged long after your demise.


So go ahead and kill the baby yarns, slay the soap seedlings, fish for the gold... cause one day it will go back into the earth and be fertilizer to grow the vegetables you'll have on your table. And without vegetables there's not enough fiber in your diet which can cause you to get really backed up. So thank the person who rapes the beads, harvests baby skeins, and strip mines the soap. Without them you'd be full of shit.


Then again some humans in fact emit methane which is a cause of global warming. So the bottom line is, you are the problem. Kill yourself and save the planet. It may not help your business, but stop being so selfish you twit.


Etsy forum thread