While flailing around desperately trying to alight on some way to help animals and align my passions with my day-to-day need to earn money, I remember placing an order at an online store in the States. My roomie and I were very excited about all the super-duper organic, vegan, eco-friendly items we were about to have delivered to our door in a few weeks. These American online stores offered so many great items that we'd never even heard of!! It was an eco-vegan shopping paradise. Then, it happened. We went to check out and there was no province listing, no ability to input a Canadian postal code. Ohio had a lot of the same letters as Ontario but I didn't think it was gonna cut it. What was going on? How were my super-duper products going to get to me if I couldn't give them my address? Back to the Shipping page; crap, they don't ship to Canada. About the 10th time this had happened to us. All our lovely items just sitting in their virtual shopping cart never to make it to our welcoming doorstep.
Then it hit us - if the store is IN Canada then it has to ship to us, right? Domestic online shopping was the solution. It sounded easy but we actually couldn't find an online Canadian store which served as a general store for vegan, organic, fair-trade items. So, we decided to start our own. And so Comondi was born.
We didn't want to offer a whole new barrage of consumer goods that nobody really needed but we did want to offer alternatives to what people were already buying and would continue to buy regardless of whether we disagreed or not. We also hoped that the items we would carry would help create positive employment for marginalized people or would support small business like us!
Basically, we wanted people to think, "I need something to scrub my dishes with but I'd like it to be sustainable, vegan and fair-trade; where can I get such a thing?" and then find us! Everytime I went to buy anything for the house, be it tea towels or mops or any mundane item, I always thought "I wonder if there's a more sustainable option?" We wanted to marry the worlds of veganism, environmentalism and fair labour. Many products out there fit one or two of these categories but very few fit them all. We wanted to find those products and offer them in place of the generic Walmart fodder. And that's really what Comondi is all about. Offering alternatives to everyday items that don't destroy the earth, that contribute to a rising sun mentality.
Well, in truth, Comondi is ACTUALLY about the animals. From the very beginning, when we sat around and discussed what this company would be, I kept saying, "It's for the animals. It has to be about them." So, to honour this, we donate 5% of our SALES (not just profits) to charities and non-profits advocating for animals. Right now, it's GAN, a great Montreal based organization. I've met the founders, Andrew and Rebecca, a few times now and really respect their dedication and compassion. With very few resources they've managed to help so many animals and get the word out about important issues. Canada is lucky to have them.
And we're hoping to have more links to animal activism and breaking issues so that people are educated when they come to the site.
For those of you wondering about the ecological costs in RUNNING a business, we spent a lot of time thinking about that. Primarily, the damaging emissions of all the trucks and planes carrying our parcels and products around the world. It still eats at us but we had to accept that nothing is perfect, that to create change there do have to be compromises. But, it's a start and we hope that customers feel good knowing that every dollar they spend at Comondi supports veganism, environmentalism, animals and people...the world really. And therein lies the name.
We spent hours and used a lot of scrap pieces of paper to come up with a name. Finally, it just came out of a book, some book I was reading about the state of the world. And one of the words was "amundi" which meant "without a world". And I thought how much I didn't want that to happen, how I wanted every living being to have a world, this very world on which we sit. And I wanted this new company to be part of that, to be truly WITH THE WORLD, WITH LIFE. So, I figured if you added a "con", in some amalgamation of languages, that would make it "conmundi", "with the world". And so, once we'd stylized and played with it, it became "Comondi".
And someday I hope Comondi will be a way of giving the animals back the world we've taken from them.
Image Credit: jcowboy
This is wonderful! I will let people know!
Posted by: Gary Loewenthal | February 05, 2007 at 09:55 AM