Yeehaw! The Rawganique folks are begrudgingly joining the 21st Century. Well, sort of...
After steadily and happily homesteading for the better part of the last 20 years and feeling content in not being fully embedded in all the technological "advancements" of the last 20 years, we are peeking out of our shells and realizing the positives of connectivity while cautiously treading this Brave New Social Media World. How's that for an opener?
We grow our own organic foods, we tend to rescued pet animals, we homestead off the grid, and we run Rawganique out of passion for a purer world. What brought us to Denman Island, a rural island in the Strait of Georgia, was the promise of pristine purity that this mild coastal island offers. It's what has kept us here all this time.
To say the least, in this day an age of throw-away cheap things made with sweatshop labor, it is a real challenge to operate on a small rural island a fast-pace eco-minded website offering only sweatshop-free non-China non-India organic products made in USA Canada and Europe. By doing everything end to end, from growing to weaving to knitting to sewing, our Atelier has to walk the tightrope of staying small, human, and personal (our goal) OR expanding and going big and corporate (what we don't want).
All these years, because of our unwillingness to give up our raw lifestyle, we have had to make do with slower delivery and more expensive and slower returns. Well, after years of prodding from customers (those who often forget that Christmas is 3 days away, or a birthday or another important event by which they need their products in 1 or 2 days), we have been working on setting up a warehouse in Washington state. This allows us to be homesteaders where we are and still be able to offer faster shipping and returns to customers who need these services. Win-win!
We feel ancient even though we're not that old. We have been away from fast-pace big city life for so long that a lot of things like viral social media frenzy seem quaint to us, like time traveling into the future. And yet we're finding out why the brouhaha over all this social media stuff. It's fun to be connected to like-minded folks and yet to still retain your privacy and space. There are so many rules of social media etiquettes that we're not quite getting the hang of yet. But we will, in time. :)