FOUNDRY VALUES

At The Foundry Home Goods we believe in beauty in utility, the powerful magic of creating a sense of place, and keeping our special spaces clean + bright using well-made, thoughtfully designed goods and tools. We also believe that we all have a marrow-deep responsibility to human dignity and environmental advocacy—that building a just, equitable, and secure future for our world and every single human in it is our great honor, privilege, and duty.

We are listening. If you have any questions about our shop values, resources to share, or big ideas to discuss, we have a dedicated email just for that: talktous@foundryhg. Feel free to drop us a line any time.

 

 

Our Commitments To Social Justice

We stand against all forms of racism. Black lives matter. We are deeply committed to action and accountability as we work together towards dismantling systemic oppression in our shop and world.

We are working toward justice and aiming for grace. This list is not complete and the work is ongoing.


Our teams:
We are creating and implementing intentional hiring practices to build a diverse and inclusive team as we grow. We are committed to supporting mental health and safety for our staff and are building in mechanisms for healthy communication and active feedback to ensure a truly equitable, inclusive, and positive workspace.

Our goods: We are actively expanding our network of makers and vendors of color. We are building and cultivating ongoing relationships to amplify Black voices and celebrate Black work. We are committing to increase that number. If you know of a brand or maker we'd love, please let us know!.

Our sources: We are also committed to ensuring that the "architecture" (technology/finance/ethics) of our supply chains support racial equity, environmental efficacy, and artistic integrity. This includes not only our vendors but also our service providers: ISP, Credit Card Processors, Lending Institutions, POS systems and beyond. If any fellow businesses have leads or feedback, drop us a line at talktous@foundryhg, we're all ears.

Our voices: We are committing to give our team (paid) time off to protest or volunteer for organizations fighting for racial, social, and environmental justice.

Our Support: In addition to our ongoing Weekend and Holiday giving campaigns, we have also launched our Foundry Giving Fridays program, an ongoing community-nominated weekly donation campaign designed to offer 1:1 targeted support directly to those individuals and organizations working towards racial equity, environmental justice, and vital human outreach in our communities. Find out more (and nominate worthy recipients!) here.

Our space
: The Foundry has always provided a physical space for community members whenever we can. We have been a free site for CSA pickups, donation drops, and (small-but-mighty!) neighborhood fundraisers. If we can help with the resource of our shared safe space, we'd love to! Let us know what you're thinking at talktous@foundryhg. We're sure there are ways forward we cannot even envision yet.  

 

We acknowledge that our Foundry story is one of White privilege (for anyone still disillusioned by this: working hard for every dollar you've earned AND benefitting from a tremendous amount of systemically supported privilege along the way are not mutually exclusive). We are complicit.

We also acknowledge that meaning well and trying hard is a good start, and that love and light is not enough. We are committed to ongoing transparency as we work towards justice, and we are committed to holding the makers, partners, and providers in our networks accountable to do the same...and, of course, we are accountable to you, our Foundry community, as well. Tell us how we can be better.

We promise to keep working towards liberty and justice for all, for real.

 

Our Commitments To Environmental Sustainability

While advocating a non-disposable lifestyle and encouraging our community to celebrate living with fewer, better things is itself a step towards sustainability, we also try to make the important daily decisions—from the vendors we carry to how we run our business—with the utmost intention and attention to how those choices affect the world at large.

 

Our goods: Many of our shop favorites come from artists, botanists, beekeepers, sewers, writers, woodworkers, and ceramicists based in the greater Minneapolis area. Not only are these offerings beautiful and lovingly made, but a local supply chain helps minimize our carbon footprint and connects smaller-scale artists and artisans with a wider network of exposure while still keeping it all close to home.

Our sources: When we do source our goods from farther afield, we make those choices specifically with the ethics and production histories of those makers in mind.

For far-flung deliveries, we choose to bundle our orders to all come at once in the largest possible shipment. While this means that sometimes we're out of hand-woven grass baskets or cult-favorite wooden rainbows for a few months at a time while we're waiting on a big shipment to arrive safe and sound, it also means that we aren't requesting small boxes to be sent via transoceanic freight willy nilly at our beck and call, with no regard to the resources required to make that happen.

This is also why you'll see a "oh, no! are we out of stock!?" message on some of our best-loved products. Those ones are the things we really love—and they're coming back!—but it's a little real-world reminder that sometimes the best things are worth waiting for, especially if a little patience is the tradeoff for thoughtful practices on the back end.

Our practices: When it comes to shipping our own orders, we try and apply the same conscientious principles. Whenever possible we use boxes that have already been shipped to us. Will, our shipping guru, has become an expert at Frankensteining old boxes together so no pieces are wasted and "new" cardboard is kept to a bare minimum. Our enclosed packaging materials are always recycled. This means you might find your order snuggled up with paper covered in kanji characters from Japan, foam sheets repurposed from old shipments of Mexican glassware, or even a bit of bubble wrap that our neighbors found in their attic and dropped off for us to use for this purpose instead of sending it to the landfill. We've literally been using the same roll of deadstock twine that Anna found in the back corner of the original Foundry building in 2012! The whole shebang might not look as "slick" as a brand new, pre-printed box in Millennial Pink, but it feels a whole lot better to us. We hope you'll please pardon the mishmash.

Our communities: We work closely with our smaller-scale makers to envision ways that we can better support them—from special order runs to flexible deliverable timelines. While this isn't necessarily "sustainability" in the Earth Day sense, keeping the local machinery oiled is a way to nurture their good choices while simultaneously reinvesting in our home-economies.

 

Climate change is real and environmental justice is social justice. We hope you will join us in making conscientious choices towards a green, safe, small, and beautiful world for all.

 

Giving Back

The Foundry has always had a deep commitment to philanthropy and going forward are working to increase and diversify our ongoing charitable donations. Learn more about our coordinated Weekend and Holiday giving campaigns and Foundry Giving Fridays here

 If you have suggestions for other worthy causes or would like to discuss our shop values, community principles, or the math behind our donation practices, please reach out at [email protected].