Hello Isabel,
I am the founder of We Are HAH and wanted to reach out to you immediately in regards to your review. I share your passion against plastic, so deeply that I started my own brand !!
First of all thank you for trusting HAH and making a purchase and thank you even more for your honest feedback and your hard stance against plastic usage.
I completely understand why you were shocked to see a Sustainable Brand shipping to you in plastic. I would like to take you a level deeper into 1 of fashions dirtiest secrets.
EVERYTHING is required by either government laws surrounding customs import/export and/or business’ rules, hygiene & storage requirements to be packed in a plastic bag.
In fact, most of the largest organizations require for you to REPACK in their specific plastic bags to the size and packing requirements for them to receive.
An average item, domestic or import, will be packed and repacked 1.5 times before it gets to you. We like to say at HAH, from the last (most likely woman) hands who packed your item to your hands, meaning we don't remove the plastic and repackage it to look pretty.
Some of the most respected retailers in the world - daily have a grossly large amount of plastic used. As they discard all the plastic the products came in to cover them in new paper? I can, I have seen it 1st hand and its heart breaking.
For me personally, I think that’s egregious waste all while not being transparent to the customer.
Now it IS possible to use recycled plastic and/or plastic options from factory to consumer. We have achieved this gold star rating in our swimwear where we have invested in Recycled, Re-usable plastic bags @ 245x the cost of regular plastic bags.
We are working with our factories to move to recycled plastic bags for the rest of HAH. It's over 50x the cost to package in these new plastic bags with very high order sizes that must be placed up front - makes it challenging for a start up to incur this cost.
I know it hits you hard, and I am glad it did - but this is what’s happening all over the world at catastrophic rates. So our choice, while we move to sustainability…is to keep it in a single use bag from the factory to the customer.
No lies, no cover ups, no pretty transition to more wasted paper or (which don’t get me started talking about trees now!)
I hope you will give us another try, I hope I have made you think. I know I have spoke truthfully and after decades in large corporations exposed to factories and storage and shipping facilities I have seen a lot of waste.
We are far from perfect, but we are committed to drive change in the industry, be transparent & to #startsomewhere, we are far from perfect
