From our latest eNewsletter mail-out today:
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Welcome to the first eNewsletter of 2008.

We've been plugging along behind the scenes mostly since December on a number of projects: warehouse and operations improvements, updating the company's documented processes, revamping our swatch department, and a number of other year-end/start duties.

One of the aspects that we started focusing on heavily in 2007 was our company's sustainability. As an internet store, we obviously do a great deal of shipping, so we've been thinking about how we can best reduce our impact in this area.

Short of opening a brick-and-mortar store, there's very little we can do to reduce our dependency on shipping. But what we have decided to do is create some measure of interaction and further reduction in our "Reduce and Reuse" campaign, by offering a discount when you opt out of plastic bags for your fabric order.

From now on, whenever placing a fabric order, you can simply paste this discount code into step one of our checkout: NOBAGS1. In return you'll save yourself an additional $1.50 for every order you place, all while helping to reduce both yours and our impact on the environment!

Whether or not you believe global warming to be an issue, you can't deny that an extra, year-round discount like this is a good thing. ;)

In addition to this discount program, we continue to increase the percentage of our waste that gets recycled; we're now recycling close to 80% of our waste and will continue working to improve upon this figure.

Some of the ways that we recover some of our trash and otherwise reduce our energy consumption is by offering fabric giveaways, recycling all paper/glass/aluminum/plastic waste, sourcing all our materials directly from local importers, running CFL's in all our office and bathroom lights, powering down electronics when not in use, and much more.

In other news, we want to extend an official, warm welcome to our latest team member, Laura. She's an experienced seamstress, very personable customer service rep and now the official swatch department manager; she'll also be posting occasionally to the industries first fabric blog:

blog.distinctivefabric.com

We'd also like to extend an official thanks to the Green Gurus for their consulting services in evaluating our company's operations throughout the last 6 months or so. We've made significant progress from where we were at a year ago and now have a number of systems in place to continue forward in a more eco-friendly manner.

If anyone's looking for such services, we highly recommend them!

Check them out online at their website:
www.greengurus.net

As always, thanks for reading and happy sewing! :)