A KIND CLOTH TURNS 3!
We are 3! THANK YOU!
A KIND CLOTH was launched in 2021, February 19, to offer dressmaking fabrics which have low impacts to our environment, compared to conventional fabrics: "sustainable fabrics" to the home sewer.
We would like to say a huge THANK YOU to all you amazing supporters for keeping us going! We can all appreciate that financial times have been increasingly difficult since the pandemic, but your encouragement has been incredible!
Thank you for visiting our online shop, purchasing, visiting our social media channels, commenting, liking, sharing, and just being immensely kind and supportive, sharing ideas with open minds, with thought for our planet.
Challenges in running A KIND CLOTH:
As a virgin product, can new fabrics been deemed as 'sustainable'? Surely, the most sustainable items are items that are already in existence. Our products are the more sustainable option, over conventional virgin fabrics available on the market, particularly in how the production and end life of the fabrics affect the environment. We have therefore been changing our promotional words to 'more sustainable', 'responsible', and 'mindful' sewing/dressmaking.
Business is tricky. We have to make money, but in encouraging people to choose and live a more sustainable life, we don't want to promote our products too much to encourage people to buy something if they don't need it. It's a fine balance that we are most definitely still working on!
Postage costs continue to be especially challenging. With the postal strikes at Royal Mail and extreme weather conditions causing delays and other issues, it is difficult for us to increase our postage prices to our customers. However, the rises keep going up and although we have had to raise them slightly over the past year, we are still absorbing much of the costs. This means that unfortunately, we do have to review the state of the postal costs on a more regular basis than before.
Coming ahead:
We are still fine tuning our fabric selection choices at A KIND CLOTH. We want to offer a balance of solid colour fabrics as well as patterned fabrics. Solid colour fabrics are easier to wear, and to mix-and-match with existing garments but we still want to offer patterned fabrics to offer character and personalised styles. Patterns are more difficult to gauge in whether the pattern is a classic print, and not just a trend over a short period. We will continue to slowly increase our choice of colours across our solid ranges, while bringing in new prints from some wonderful designers.
We are continuing to source fabrics with similar properties and growth such as hemp and linen, but are struggling to find suppliers who cater for small businesses, and only for large corporations. We do however have a few leads, so fingers crossed!
There's a still a few days left... Email subscribers and social media followers should hopefully already be aware, but if you haven't yet heard: as a thank you to all our wonderful customers, we are offering you an exclusive offer, of 20% off all fabrics in our shop this week only, to help celebrate our third birthday! Just use code "AKC3BDAY" at checkout! Offer ends 23:59hrs Sunday 25th Feb 2024, minimum £5.00 spend, valid on fabrics only.
Check out our range of more sustainable fabric options here for some mindful sewing!
Thank you for being with us!
xoxoxo
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Photo: Marine is wearing a self-made Risa Blouse from Fibremood (personal), made with EcoVero™ Viscose Crepe Cobalt Blue, and sewn using Scanfil Organic Cotton Thread Ocean