For Black Friday 2024 TWOTHIRDS is reclaiming the colour black. It’s the colour of the night sky and deep ocean. We’ve had enough of it being hijacked by fast fashion brands to force rubbish products on consumers at prices that are not sustainable for people or planet. Our Blue Friday Sales are a blueprint for how Sustainable Black Friday Sales should really be done.
Why Fast Fashion Black Fridays Should Sink Without Trace
Before we get to how our Sustainable Black Friday Sales (or Blue Friday Sales as we call them) are the right balance between conscious consumerism and waste avoidance, we first need to discuss the following Fast Fashion Black Friday equation: Overconsumption = overproduction + waste.
One of the worst things about Black Friday is how it preys on peoples’ insecurities and fears of missing out (FOMO). Most people probably only need one or two sustainable knits or that one special ethical jacket for the winter, but instead fast fashion tells them that they’ll only be complete as a person if they spend the same amount of money on six knits and three jackets, all of which will be of such low quality that they barely last for more than a few weeks. What happens to them then? They go straight in the bin!
Worse still, many fashion brands don’t use Black Friday Sales as a means of selling off excess stock, but instead produce extra stock, or even whole new collections, especially for Black Week Sales. This means that even more high impact overproduction and waste occurs, with consumers and the planet suffering the consequences. It’s just one of the many reasons that TWOTHIRDS has thrown our weight behind the Speak Volumes campaign based in Accra, Ghana, a place where much of this excess clothing eventually ends up.
Keep reading to find out how TWOTHIRDS make Sustainable Black Friday Sales a reality: where sales are only ever used as a last resort, to find a home for that extra special sustainable winter jacket made from mulesing-free wool or that eco-friendly knit crafted from 100% luxury deadstock yarn.
Are Sustainable Black Friday Sales Possible?
As you’re about to read, we think Sustainable Black Friday Sales ARE possible, but with some fairly hefty terms & conditions attached. These are necessary to avoid what’s known in the business as “greenwashing”. Greenwashing is the practice of saying something you do or a product you sell is sustainable or good for the environment, when in fact it is quite the opposite. Think of airlines trying to sell sustainable flights or a fossil fuel company trying to rename gas as “green natural gas” and you start to get the idea.
This happens all the time in the fashion world, as brands compete for sustainability credentials, often without having the slightest bit of evidence to back up their claims. That’s why if you see a brand advertising Sustainable Black Friday Sales or Ethical Black Week Sales, it’s worth digging around a bit to find out what they really mean. Luckily for TWOTHIRDS customers, they don’t have to go digging in the small print, because we tell them exactly what makes our Sustainable Black Friday Sales different from all the rest…
How do Blue Friday Sales Differ From Black Alternatives?
The thing that makes TWOTHIRDS truly unique is also what makes our Sustainable Black Friday Sales so eco-friendly: our PRE-ORDER system. The fashion industry is wasteful by design. A staggering 30% of new clothing is either incinerated or sent to landfill. Our PRE-ORDER system rejects such environmentally devastating waste. Instead, we build a PRE-ORDER pact with customers: they wait a while for new collection items and we only make the products they truly need. The result? Overproduction and waste are reduced to zero.
This means that by the time Black Friday Sales or our Blue Week Sales roll around, the only excess sustainable knits or eco-friendly jackets we have in our warehouse are sizing returns, pieces that were exchanged, or tiny amounts of stock (between 0-3%) that remained unsold due to order cancellations etc. All this means that a Sustainable Black Friday sale run by TWOTHIRDS is all about eradicating our overproduction and waste footprint, rather than regular Black Friday Fashion Sales which ramp up both overproduction and waste to the max.
Why You Should Buy Less, But Better
We often get comments on our social media feeds that go a little like this: “I love your brand and everything you stand for, but I can’t justify spending so much on one sustainable jacket or one sustainable knit.”
Trust us, we get it. But what modern consumers need to understand is that the true environmental and socioeconomic cost of an ethically sourced and well crafted sustainable jacket is much closer (or even higher) than what we charge at TWOTHIRDS. It’s why during our Blue Week Sales we don’t encourage people to buy tonnes of ethical clothing but rather that one sustainable jacket that will last a lifetime or a timeless ethical winter outfit you can turn to again and again. Our Sustainable Blue Friday Sales enable us to offer our premium sustainable clothing to our Blue Community at a price point that is both fair to you, the consumer, and to the thing we love most: our ocean.
