🧦 We Don't Make Holiday Socks
Arvin Goods Socks, Banks Journal, What happens to your returns?, DesignerCon Be@rbrick, RS Top 100 Songs of 2023
'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.
Arvin News
Hello and Happy Sunday!
As the year winds down we start to see all the holiday stories and year-end lists popping up. One story that caught our eye below is from the Atlantic talking about what happens to products when you return them. Our world is very convenient you can get almost anything at any time. We are no different, a few clicks on our site and socks show up at your door a few days later. The Atlantic article examines all the systems costs, and waste involved when you return something. It is a complicated equation to figure out how to provide great customer experiences without breaking the bank when something delivered doesn’t work out for whatever reason. In Arvin Goods’ case, it generally doesn’t pencil out for you, or us to ship back and restock a couple pair of socks. Because of this, we try to work with customers to find a satisfactory solution. Can we gift them to someone else? Can we donate them to someone in need? We want you to be happy with us as a company but also find alternative ways to solve the problem and minimize the impact and use of resources as a brand. This approach carries an added cost for us, but almost 100% of the time leads to our customers being excited and happy with their experience, and hopefully, coming back for another pair in the future, or better yet, telling a friend about us. So when you get your Arvin’s if there is any issue, hit us up, and let’s see how we can keep you happy, and keep the socks in use.
A reminder that we are in the midst of our holiday cyber sale. 40% off site-wide, use the code 40FORME. 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,
Harry & Dustin (Team AG) ✌️🧦
Stories Of The Week…
Industry
Banks Journal Co-Founder on What Led to the Brand’s Bankruptcy - Shop Eat Surf
Mounting debt and the final-hour breakdown of a last-ditch investment deal pushed Banks Journal into bankruptcy proceedings that shuttered the 10-year-old surf brand in October.
News of the closure was abrupt and seemed unexpected. However, internally the company had struggled to turn profitable as debt mounted. The challenges that came with the pandemic sent the business over the edge.
“We were still dealing with some really difficult cash flow issues because of the lack of profit in a lot of the sales we were making. It really affected us because we still had the bills that we packed in through Covid,” said co-founder Rama McCabe. “And then having to get rid of that product at such a low margin, we were trying to dig ourselves out of that hole. But it was a hole that was too big to get out of.”🏄🏼🌊🫤
Environment
THIS IS WHAT HAPPENS TO ALL THE STUFF YOU DON’T WANT- The Atlantic
When you order a pair of sweatpants online and don’t want to keep them, a colossal, mostly opaque system of labor and machinery creaks into motion to find them a new place in the world. From the outside, you see fairly little of it—the software interface that lets you tick some boxes and print out your prepaid shipping label; maybe the UPS clerk who scans it when you drop the package off. Beyond that, whole systems of infrastructure—transporters, warehousers, liquidators, recyclers, resellers—work to shuffle and reshuffle the hundreds of millions of products a year that consumers have tried and found wanting. And deep within that system, in a processing facility in the Lehigh Valley, a guy named Michael has to sniff the sweatpants.👖🎁♼
Design
DesignerCon 2023 to Feature Special Edition BE@RBRICKs - Hypebeast
This year’s DesignerCon, set to bring together 600 vendors and over 350 global artists and designers for its 18th annual convention, features a multi-layered collaborative release from Medicom Toy. Collaborators for these special edition BE@RBRICK collectibles include names like Shepard Fairey, JJ Lin, The Hundreds and DabsMyla.
The collectibles come in a range of sizes, from 100% to 1000% — with some coming in sets and others separately. Leading the pack is a 1000% example from artist Shepard Fairey that features a motif or collage of various mixed media graphics, expressed in his signature color palette. In addition to this, Fairey also has a 100% and 400% set release, which features a primarily red BE@RBRICK with the artist’s “Make Art Not War” graphic at the center of the collectible.🧸👨🏻💻
Entertainment
The 100 Best Songs of 2023 - Rolling Stone
We love music over here at Arvin Goods, and always try to share something interesting each week. It seems fitting that we share the Rolling Stone Top 100 songs list for the year. It was the year of Taylor. Obviously. But, music is a personal taste thing, so love them or hate them here are 100 tracks that made us move this year. 🎸🥁