Back when it was just our long-suffering friends and family buying our wares and laughing at our jokes, we made everything out of a tiny home-based office in the Vancouver-ish area of BC. Since growing (in size, but never up), we’ve enlisted the help of our partner (and friend) Anna and her family-run business based in Guangdong province, China. They’ve been sourcing, cutting, and polishing stone since 1996 and are experts in helping us create satire-laden treasures to our exact specifications. The 10 and 11pm Zoom calls with the time
zone difference can be a bit tricky to manage some days, but we love working with Anna and her team and think it’s totally worth it.

Snarky copy and other brand shenanigans and design stuff are created, printed, and packaged up in Canada and shipped off to each of you dark-hearted, black humour-loving heathens.

We do our best to source our gemstones responsibly by working with lapidaries who are audited by third parties. Our main lapidary is a family-run business based in Guangzhou, in Guangdong province, China. This region is known as a major centre for gold, silver, platinum, crystal, semi-precious stones, pearls, agate, and jade.  

Anna and her team cut, polish, craft, and quality check a wide range of gemstone items, including our beads. They’re audited by TUV Rheinland, a global independent test provider with a history of 140 years of practice. They deliver local testing and certification services linked to the safety of products and the quality of management systems. TUV provides auditing to ensure reliable, high-quality products, safe working conditions for employees, and low environmental impact.

Our ultimate dream is to utilize blockchain technology to track every single component through our supply chain from source to completion: raw material processing, hand crafting (in beautiful BC, Canada), and delivery to our customers. It’s a nifty project, but it’s at its infancy. Like, single-cell level infancy. It’s a work in process and we look forward to being able to share updates when we can. If you’re into this or know someone who might be interested in geeking out with us, drop us a line at hello@freshlyunbothered.com. 

Just like you, we don’t think sustainability should be some disingenuous corporate bolt-on program because an out of touch CEO finally realized that not totally trashing our earth while on the quest for ‘happiness’ should be a consideration factor for business success. We’ve worked in enough corporate environments to feel the sting of performative BS for the sake of shareholder PR, and we don’t like it either.

The whole question about sustainability in commerce requires a bigger response than a few lines in a 2-dimensional FAQ section of a website. But you’re here, and you’re reading, so we’re going to take a moment to spiral for a minute. Feel free to join us if you like!

If you’re crunched for time, the TLDR: Large economic systems are fucked, we’re stuck in them, we want to do our part to be better even though we are tiny, no effort is perfect, and we still want to try anyway.

For the rest of you who want to pause and go down a rabbit hole of verbal spillage, buckle in…

How does a company encouraging people to buy stuff purport anything related to sustainability? It’s a contradiction that wreaks of hypocrisy. How do we reconcile goals of growing so we can retire early and be stay-at-home dog parents, when our planet is suffering from catastrophic, irresponsible, over extraction that will ultimately result in our own, self-punishing demise? Cheerful stuff.

Our form of therapy is to connect with people by combining beautiful objects with a cathartic laugh about stinging topics, while simultaneously wanting to feel spacious and optimistic, too. Does that mean our personal needs should take precedence over the greater good required for future generations to thrive and not go full ecocide on ourselves? No. Isn’t that partly the mentality that got us here in the first place? Ever since earlier versions of humans were crawling out of ponds with our gills still flapping, we’ve been inflicting a ‘my way and needs are better and more important than yours’ mentality on each other, leading to centuries of conflict, often with devastatingly violent results.

Ok we just derailed from beaded bracelets and laughing about depression to countries at war. That escalated quickly. But we digress….

So much of our day-to-day existence on this planet involves us extracting from it in some way. From the energy we consume, to the goods we buy, and the toll our activities take on this beautiful blue and green cosmic marble we call home. We’ve got a history of taking a lot, and not giving back. All we have to do is gaze into the big, innocent, fur-rimmed brown eyes of our employee of the month and know we have a responsibility not just to ourselves but to the others with whom we share this all. Particularly those with less power or privilege than us.

We don’t know about you, but sorting our recycling into the right bins can feel like standing by the edge of the ocean trying to bail it out with a teaspoon when you start to think about the scale of the issues we face. But there are loads of incredibly smart people working on These Big Problems. People and institutions who can, and are, helping to shift enormous fucked up systems and policies at national and global levels. Decisions that are way bigger than anything this pleb can influence (if we take a cynical view about our democratic voting power, for those who have it). Their work is honourable, impressive, and inspiring. At the same time, we don’t think it’s ok to eschew our individual responsibly to do better. It’s not either-or. It’s both-and. Macro level accountability and micro level efforts. Call us naïve but isn't tackling the problem from multiple angles a good thing? We defer to the climate scientists and people who have degrees in Solving Very Big Problems on that one.

Is it fucked up that a brand is having this one-sided ramble in the FAQ section of their website? Probably. But we’re also living and working in this brain burning system and think that complex, difficult conversations are a necessary part of the multicoloured tapestry that is the human experience. Even if it’s kind of stupid and reductive to have it in this format.

So now what? A bunch of self-indulgent navel gazing doesn’t solve any of this stuff. The reality is we don’t have a decent answer. We want to make and sell things in a way that is conscientious. Our ultimate dream is to utilize blockchain technology to track every single component through our supply chain from source to completion: raw material processing, hand crafting in beautiful BC, and delivery to our customers, wherever they are. We want to ensure our participation honours the planet, its people, and future generations. It’s a nifty project, but it’s at its infancy. Like, single-cell level infancy when you’re trying to grow a whole woolly mammoth. It’s a work in progress and we look forward to sharing updates when we can. If you’re into this or know someone who might be interested in geeking out with us, drop us a line at hello@freshlyunbothered.com.

As part of Dampen the Dumpster Fire, we also plan to donate part of our profits to support charitable causes that have personal meaning to us.

So, we’re here. We’re part of it. And we’re going to do our best to fuck things up as little as possible while we're at it. We expect to make some mistakes along the way. And to learn a ton. But that doesn’t mean we won’t, and shouldn't, try.