Our Black Friday for Future
Everywhere you look these days, Black Friday, Cyber Monday, entire Black or Cyber Weeks are aggressively advertised offline and online – days with the highest sales of the year in retail. Products being produced especially for a few days, reference prices are deliberately set high in order to make it possible to be reduced massively – everything is geared towards maximum consumption. It cannot be denied that in such situations producers and traders consciously create artificial needs and rely on impulse purchases. The corona crisis is probably even supporting this behaviour as people might have more time to shop online, and supposed bargains are a good compensation for the restrictions of the last few weeks.
When in doubt, things are consumed that are not needed at all in the first place – that production and transport naturally swallow a lot of resources is accepted by the majority of consumers and by profit-oriented producers and traders (more or less consciously).
We at Manitober try to come with a little different approach as we want to advocate a more conscious consumption. That's why we don't jump on the bandwagon of bargain hunters who have gone wild on Black Friday, but instead focus on our refurbished items.
More and more often we receive inquiries about our refurbished articles, whether and when more of them are available in the shop, whether certain articles can also be bought second hand, etc. So far it has unfortunately been a bit quiet here, we had to console a lot of requests. In our defense: We have only been around for three years so far, so we first had to collect a few pieces after we sold them in the beginning so that we could offer them to you again.
For the last few weeks we have been working at full speed to sift through your returns, sort, wash and repair them and finally offer them to you in the shop on Black Friday For Future.
No extra produced items, no rock-bottom prices, but returned second-hand items from our customers who have already had one or two lives and stories behind them. We have reconditioned, washed, and repaired them and the items are now looking for a new owner who shares our values. The things stay in circulation and are offered at a fair price. ‘Normal’ second-hand purchases are a good start, but T-shirts produced under poor working conditions in low-wage countries also remain second-hand T-shirts produced under poor working conditions in low-wage countries. Sustainably produced, durable articles that have a second or third use are always better.
In order to remain consistent within our ideology, and since we are always trying to conserve resources and extend the life of products, we also send the reconditioned items in the original RePack, a packaging that can be reused up to 20 times. We'll cover the costs for this on Black Friday For Future – as you might tell, this is a really important matter to us. :)