Nice to have you here again and reading my weekly blog! This week was packed with FUN, because it marked my one-year anniversary of living in Spain. It was not necessarily the easiest year to move to Spain with the Catalan Independence issues in October last year, and then Covid and the total lockdown here in Barcelona, but.... even with these difficult situations I look back on a wonderful first year. Starting with the launch of the Spain web shop on January 1st and our first Spanish customer on January 2nd. This may sound a bit exaggerated to you, but I really had tears in my eyes at the time! So happy.
It's all still in its infancy here in Spain, but the engine is starting to turn! And I live, in my opinion, in the most beautiful apartment in Barcelona. I get to enjoy sunshine every day, "the lamp" that is always on. Did I mention that I have not worn a winter coat once in the past year? How nice is that? I'm happy here!
But this week there was even more fun. I received the first batch of our new web shop shipping bags at the office. They are 100% biodegradable. Bio what? Well...100% biodegradable. But for real! After 6 weeks, this "plastic" has completely disappeared into compost and has no effect on the environment. It just disappears!
Degradable is a term gets tossed around quite a bit. That's why it took me a lot of time to find the right partner. I also wanted to contribute to the environment with All-time Favourites by replacing our regular plastic shipping bags. They just don't make me feel good and they don't make sense. If we encourage you to buy an ATF bag so that you no longer need plastic bags in the supermarket, then we shouldn't supply ATF shoppers in plastic bags, right?
Thank goodness for Luigi. He brought Timberland to Europe in the 1980s. He's around 60 now and he tells me the best stories about the business as it used to be. He joined Geox via Timberland via Puma. And he saw how much packaging in the shoe business consists of plastic. And he wanted to change that. He has now started a company in Munich that helps the major shoe labels in particular to completely ban plastic in packaging and labeling. Every time I saw him pop up LinkedIn, winning one award after another, and getting official seals of approval one after another, I thought maybe I should call him.
After chatting for an hour, we started talking about what we could do together. He had never done shipping bags before, but he wanted to take on this challenge with me. We made one prototype after another. The seams of one tore. The adhesive edge did not stick well on another. Until this week, the approved bags finally arrived.
We were able to make these bags completely according to our own wishes. In our own ATF color pink. With "ALL-TIME FUN STARTS NOW" on the front. We think that fun starts the moment the package arrives at your home. And then when you open the back, you read about this pink bag. And we hope you feel even better about All-time Favourites! (see photos below)
The biodegradable bags will arrive in our warehouse at the end of September and all web shop orders will sent in them from then on. Please let me know what you think of them!
Enjoy your weekend!
Love Brechje
