I’ve just re-read the ‘Labels Round 1’ post, and apart from being a little surprised that I wrote it so very long ago (the day job and life in general having taken a busy turn), I’m pleased to say that we’ve now sorted the labelling out. We’ve negotiated the price, done a test design, and are waiting for our sample labels to arrive. We did consider dropping labels altogether, but as we’re not planning to do much in the way of

conventional advertising we need some way of letting people know that what they are looking at is just so brilliant compared with everything else out there. It’s hard to see how we could alert people to our brilliance in any other way. Plus our coconut tags will do a good job of alerting people to how natural our stuff is.

Branding has been around for a very long time, and it’s how most of the world shops. We call each other by name, and we also need to name our products – I’m not quite sure I get the anti-branding thing, it doesn’t make much sense to me when you analyse it logically. Where would we draw the line? Would we stop giving our children names? Or our T-shirts? Or just the companies and people who make our T-shirts?

But I digress: having received lots of samples and information we decided to not to go with any of the options we looked at in Labels Round 1, and here’s why:

The leather labels were by far the most controversial. Even though I found examples of organic leather products on the internet, actually getting hold of any organic leather proved impossible. Neither I nor the leather label guy could find any in the UK. Added to this, although embossed leather labels were the absolute initial winners in terms of looks, application and wear and tear, in the end the controversy of the meat and animal farming industry wasn’t something we wanted to get tangled up with. As animal farming apparently accounts for between 14 – 22% of the world’s green house gas emissions, leather, even as a by-product, would be the least eco-friendly option available. (Take a look at Meatless Monday Campaign for interesting environmental statistics – Paul McCartney has also recently launched Meat Free Mondays the UK.)
Vegan ‘leather’ is still not an option because it’s just synthetic plastic, nothing remotely natural or environmentally friendly about it.

The other leather option, E-leather, proved to be a surprising dead end as well. I couldn’t get anyone at the end of their mailbox to give me any real information about E-leather. Although it can be embossed and someone is apparently making labels from it, the recycled leather is re-coloured with a PU (polyurethane) coating. Whether this is ‘good‘ PU or not, or how the colouring works, I‘ll never know because I couldn’t get any information about, well, anything really, despite a good few emails. All things considered, we can’t work with anyone who doesn’t want to be transparent, and although recycling should in principle be a good thing in this case it appears to result in something that is highly processed and chemically heavy: the chemicals already present in the leather off-cuts are still present after recycling, the recycling itself requires intensive processing, and finally it is PU coated. This means that neither the leather itself nor the PU coating would fulfil one of our main criteria – to have as small a chemical footprint as possible.

As we’re well on our way to achieving a zero toxic product, we need to make sure we don’t mess this up with the packaging and labelling. This isn’t some arbitrary requirement; we believe it’s going to become a very real necessity in the future.
To reduce the heavy environmental burden of heating and cooling inefficient houses, building regulations require houses to be more insulated and ‘sealed’ than ever before. The building regulations proposed for 2012 in the UK will mean that new houses will be almost completely sealed, with proper passive air exchange units to keep the air clean and fresh. Houses in Germany are already being built like this, and although this is good in terms of heat efficiency, carbon footprint and oxygenated rooms (assuming you‘ve installed the necessary passive heat/air exchanger), it means we all will need to be a lot more careful about the toxic off-gas of furniture, fireproofed furnishings, paint, plastics, treated wood etc. The most energy (and cost) efficient way of heating or cooling a house is to use a lot of good insulation, seal it as best you can, and install a low-energy air replacement unit (not an air conditioning unit, but a unit that draws fresh air in, heated or cooled to room temperature, to replace the old stale air). Houses being build like this in Germany need little or no extra heating even during harsh winters. The air quality can, however, become polluted by the toxic off-gas from the objects in your house. Although this is happening in your home right now, it’s not as easy to notice if you have a leaky house. Chemicals in the paints you use, the fireproofing on almost all the furnishings you buy, and the chemical compounds in everyday plastics and fabrics all emit a toxic gas-off. Walk into any newly refurbished shop or aeroplane and take a deep breath. What can you smell? Mmmm, lovely toxins. We associate this smell so much now with things that are new and nice, that we even like the smell.
Even if you don‘t understand the need to reduce the chemical footprint of all the stuff we make and use for the sake of the planet (and the fish, the bees, the bears etc…), it’s easy to understand why we need to reduce the toxicity of things for the sake of our health. As our world becomes ever more toxic, the resultant build up of toxins in our body due to prolonged exposure is slowly undermining our immunity to disease. Is there any wonder that cancers and the like are on the increase?

Anyhow, back to the labels…

The best labels from Labels Round 1 proved to be the organic cotton woven labels. We can get unbleached undyed organic cotton for the base, with the information woven in recycled polyester. We’re leaving these as our back-up in case something goes horribly wrong with coconuts.

After an unbelievable amount of research and a little bit of inspired thinking we have settled on coconuts as our raw material of choice. The coconut tags aren’t completely perfect because we were looking for a sew-able label and not a swing tag, but as they tick all the other boxes it’s a compromise we’ll most likely make. They look great, visually they ‘fit’, and they emphasise at a glance that our products are completely natural. From what we can tell, and the patient label-maker has been very happy to answer all my intense questioning, we have a swing tag that is completely natural, doesn’t have to be ‘made’ as such, and is a by-product that would usually go to landfill. It’s easy to cut and doesn’t require any ’finishing’ other than polishing. He’s sending us some samples of our logo on different coconut shells so we can choose if we prefer them smoother or rougher; lighter or darker.

Did I mention – they look really good!