🧦Why We Failed on Amazon (Part 1)
Our Journey Through the Amazon, The Pope as Street Art, Monster Children, Earth Day and Politics, Frankie and the Witch Fingers, New Arvin Goods
Happy Sunday,
This week was Earth Day. We hate Earth Day, it’s one of those things that shouldn’t require “a day” if you know what we mean. What was intended to be a call for action decades ago has devolved into a giant marketing scheme. But this seems as good a time as any to start this topic of the Amazon Climate Pledge Friendly marketplace, and our failed attempts to run with the big dogs. A (very) quick breakdown in case you are not familiar with this. In 2019 Amazon, as a company launched a climate commitment to be “net-zero” by 2040. They asked other companies to be part of this commitment. To date they have over 500 additional large company partners in this pledge. In a broad scope view, we LOVE this, we need more companies making big moves like this. That said, you can dig in pretty hard and find a lot of challenges to the math around it all, and the entire theory of “net-zero” but that is for scientists, politicians, and economists to debate, not a couple dudes slinging socks. (You can deep dive more here if you want Amazon or Sustainability)
The Climate Pledge Friendly marketplace is completely separate from the corporate Climate Pledge. We learned this when we tried to join the Climate Pledge in 2021 and discovered we were way too small to be part of it. We were offered an opportunity to submit our products for review, and if we checked all the boxes, we could be in the marketplace for “approved” products. This was pretty early on for us as a brand, and for this new marketplace from Amazon. We could write a 50-page paper on this topic, but we will spare you the minutia and summarize it quickly. You submit your brand, and then work with a 3rd party auditor to verify the validity of your (sustainability) claims. In our case, the claim was that we are using recycled base yarns and reducing water and waste to almost zero in our production process. The auditing company is a huge multinational conglomerate called Control Union. You submit a mountain of paperwork, then they visit your facilities, interview suppliers, and employees. And so on. Surprise! We passed.
The audit process cost us all in, just over $20,000. That is sunk money, there is no actual value in it, you can only make that back by selling goods. So we set out to sell a lot of socks.
“Socks” or some variation of socks is a top 500 search term on Amazon. Top 500 doesn’t sound very sexy, but when you consider there are 100’s of millions of searches, this means anything in the top 500 sells a HUGE volume. We believed that being the best socks on a new featured marketplace with the biggest consumer audience on the planet was a no-brainer. The pitch from Amazon was that this marketplace was going to get a huge push from corporate marketing and could be the new “prime” with specific search filters.
When we first went live we were one of only a few sock brands that were approved, one of which was Amazons own Amazon Basics brand. If you searched “mens socks” you got a result of “greater than 100,000 results”. If you clicked the Climate Pledge Friendly filter, it reduced to 21. 21! That means we were on page one of search results, without paying for it. If you are page one on a top 500 search product, you are moving serious units. We were all in. A big opportunity for a small brand with a great story, and the “retailer” was going to pump their own marketing dollars into driving traffic to the new marketplace…
Too good to be true?
This is to be continued, but we’ll give you a hint: Hanes 6 packs is now #1 out of 4,000+ results, and below is their sustainability claim.
This is the Dolphin Safe Tuna of apparel certifications.
Enjoy the news below, and have a great week!
Hope you enjoy today’s Clean Up. We would love to hear from you. Comment here on substack hit us on social, or email us at info@arvingoods.com. Have a great week. Cheers,
Team AG ✌️🧦
Stories Of The Week…
Design & Art
Artist honors Pope Francis with street art as Vatican prepares for funeral - WGNTV
VATICAN CITY — Steps from the Vatican, on the final day of the public viewing, and on the eve of the funeral for Pope Francis, the roads are being closed off to car traffic.
People can still walk through, and when they do, they encounter works by an artist who has been capturing the essence of Pope Francis since his election.🦸🏻♂️🧱🖼️
Photo
Disposable: Ben Chadourne - Monster Children
They were talking about the parts that they love, and the parts that they are excited to see. One of them talked about how they were excited to see the new Ben Chadourne part (starring Hjalte, linked above), which was interesting to me because Ben isn’t the one skating in the video, he is the one filming. In an enormously saturated market of skateboarding videos made easy and disposable by the internet, there are thousands and thousands of skate content creators putting out clips that are absolute shit (blah blah blah yaddah yaddah complaining about the saturated skate media landscape again), so shit in fact that certain filmers have become known themselves as quality producers; people to return to, to admire, to look forward to. Ben Chadourne is one of those filmers.
I leaned in and told one of the kids that I was also a fan of Ben and that I had recently mailed him a couple of disposable cameras to shoot for this article. They asked why I was talking to them, and I told them I just overheard what they were saying and thought they might be interested to know. One of the kids said, ‘no I mean why are you talking to us, we are kids . What are you even doing here? You can barely even skate. What’re you, like, fifty?’ and I said, ‘bitch I’m thirty I was crooked grinding before you were even spewed from your mother fuck you,’ and then I tried to skate off but I hit a pebble before I could get any speed so I lunged out and hit my nose on the ground really fucking hard and the kids laughed and so I sprung up off the ground - my face covered in blood and tears - and I focused my board and shouted, ‘you’re next!’ and they ran off.
Anyway, I mailed Ben some disposable cameras and gave him a month to shoot them. Here’s what he came back with.📷🛹
Industry
We used to agree on Earth Day. Political division has changed environmental priorities - LA Times
This year marks the 55th anniversary of Earth Day, but rather than enjoying its golden years, the planet is facing a new kind of peril. In recent weeks, the Republican party — the same party that oversaw the creation of the eco-conscious holiday back in 1970 — has delivered considerable blows to the environment, including taking steps to undo critical Nixon-era policies that protect the nation’s air, water, natural lands and threatened species.
President Nixon presided over the first Earth Day, founded in large part as a reaction to a devastating oil spill off the coast of California. Nixon and his wife, First Lady Pat Nixon, planted a tree on the White House lawn to commemorate the occasion.
The holiday ushered in a decade of environmental activism and legislation under his conservative leadership, including the creation of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and the signing of the Clean Air Act in 1970; the Clean Water Act in 1972; and the Endangered Species Act in 1973.🌱🌎
Entertainment
Frankie and the Witch Fingers - Full Performance (Live on KEXP) - YouTube
Frankie and the Witch Fingers are described in their bio as “Los Angeles based psych-punk shapeshifters”. Seems reasonably representative of the current state of affairs in the US. Plus they kill this live performance on KEXP!🎸🥁🔮🤘
'The Clean Up' is a weekly newsletter that mixes in some Arvin Goods news, products, as well as stories we saw during the week that are worth a share. From books to podcasts, sustainability to business news, we try to keep it interesting, and fun. If you are not a subscriber, sign up and join everyone who receives The Clean Up directly in their inbox every Sunday.