2022 Personal and Store Resolutions for the New Year

January 20, 2022
Reading time: 6 min 30 sec

Hey everyone, it's 2022! We hope this year will be positive and inspiring (despite any current world events). We've been doing a lot of thinking about what it means to live in optimal health and live a vibrant life. 

Here are our 2022 resolutions, both personally and for our store. We hope they can also help motivate you to take action this year toward living your dreams.

Personal Resolutions:

1. Drink Fresh Juice Every Day

We only sell vegan products in our store, but we think that whether you follow a 100% vegan diet or not, the most important thing that we can do for our health (and the planet) is to eat as many fruits and vegetables as possible. While it is important to eat lots of fruit, whole grains, leafy greens, a vast array of vegetables (both cooked and raw), beans, nuts, and seeds for a balanced plant-based diet, we can't emphasize enough the difference that juicing makes. Fresh juice is a micronutrient flood to the cells of the body, having the ability to give us an instant boost of natural energy. Juicing allows us to consume levels of phytochemicals, antioxidants, and enzymes that would be otherwise difficult to achieve. Juicing is something that we have done for years, and it gives us a sense of overall well-being with a burst of clean energy that is hard to match. You will need a juice extractor, but it doesn't need to cost a ton of money. Most of the newest models of slow juice extractors are in the $100-$200 range, but we recently found an older model juicer for just $30 (although it is a bit louder than the newer models). Fresh juicing is not even comparable to drinking store-bought pasteurized juices. It's another world of health benefits. 

2. Exercise Every Day

It's the winter, which is always a difficult time to push ourselves to be active outdoors. But the difference in how we feel comparing a sedentary lifestyle and exercising even only 1 hour a day is astounding. Getting your heart rate up and developing muscle helps keep your metabolism active, your immune system functioning well, and your productivity high during the day. One thing that every medical, health, and fitness professional across the board can agree on is that exercise is vitally important to our health. Obesity is a major risk factor for all diseases. We think there's no real excuse not to exercise, and we will remember to keep reminding ourselves of this on days when it doesn't come easily.

3. Sun Every Day

Sunshine is quite literally the most powerful energy source that there is. Getting enough sunlight during the day is vital for raising our levels of vitamin D and aligning our Circadian rhythm and sleep cycles. We've made it a goal to get at least 30 minutes of sunlight onto our bodies a day, if not much more on sunny days. 

4. Read More Books

While video is a wonderful form of communication and can be used to effectively teach and learn, it's also often easy to get sucked into scrolling endlessly through reels and videos. For certain subjects such as how-to videos or exercise routines, it can be productive to learn from watching videos. But reading does something for our brains that video can't do. It helps us to gain focus and concentration, and also to calm our minds. Sustainable and ethical living is about slowing down and thinking about our beliefs and actions, and reading helps us enter into that mindset. We've made it a goal to read more and scroll less this year.

5. Fine-Tune Conscious Habits

Living a clean lifestyle is what we are all about. We must pay attention to every single thing that we do in our daily lives. Every substance we use in our homes or on our bodies must be evaluated. Our diet, our wardrobe choices, our transportation choices are all part of our daily habits. Being conscious about our thoughts and actions is the foundation of positive change and developing habits that make us more aware of ourselves and our impact.

6. Frequency Sync

We have been paying a lot of attention to frequency and vibration lately. Music has a huge potential to help us change our thought patterns and bring abundance and happiness into our lives. We are making a point to listen to Solfeggio frequencies that help us overcome negative thoughts and tune in to a more elevated and enlightened vibrational energy.

7. Time Management

So often we tell ourselves that we don't have time to do things, even if they are things that we want to do. We realize that this is only an excuse to procrastinate, be lazy, or do comfortable, easy tasks and put off the more difficult ones. This can apply to all areas of our lives, for example, saying that you don't have time to cook and be in control of your health, or saying that you don't have time to turn a passion into a business. I fall prey to this too, often in the form of writer's block and choosing to do easier things instead of writing. Let's make this the year that we take control of our time and realize that we do have the time for things that matter, if only we make the time by choosing to eliminate distractions.

Store Resolutions for 2022:

1. Always Timely Shipping

There's never been a more important time to support small stores and independent entrepreneurs. With the ever-continuing consolidation of global power in many forms, our purchases are either fueling the beast or helping keep small stores in business. We make it a point to ship within 24-48 hours so there's no excuse to shop on Amazon for cork products. (Please note, items on pre-order have a longer wait period).

2. Sustainable Packaging

We're always making a point to improve every aspect of our store. Packaging is no exception. A sustainable store must take a magnifying glass to every single detail that comes into play and packaging material can't be overlooked. We've always used recycled and unbleached paper for shipping padding rather than plastic, and we do our best to use as little material as possible while making sure that your item is protected in transit. We are transitioning the last of our old resources (namely poly-mailers) to entirely biodegradable materials as soon as we finish what we already have.

3. Personal Customer Service

We take customer service seriously. I worked for many years in brick-and-mortar retail and let me tell you, I've seen some pretty bad customer service interactions. From employees arguing with customers, blaming them for things, wording things in an aggressive manner, or just being vacant and rude, I've hidden my face and walked away shaking my head many times while overhearing these types of conversations. Suffice it to say, this is not how we treat people here. It can be easy to hide behind a computer screen in an online atmosphere and forget that you're talking to a real person on the other end. We not only do our best to respond to emails, calls, and messages as quickly as we can, but we also have a store ethos to always be kind and go out of our way to make our customers happy.

4. Full Transparency

We give credit where credit is due. We put our amazing brands in the spotlight and give full credit to them as the designers. Our store's mission was always to bring the absolute best quality cork products all to one place. We think the brands we source are doing incredible work, and each one brings something unique to our store. Each of our products clearly states who the maker is, where the product is made, and the material composition of each product. We also have created a page for each of our brands, where you can read their stories and ethical values. You can access these pages via our Brands Page.

5. Always Bringing the Best Vegan Cork Brands to You

This is what we are all about and why we exist as a store. We live between the US and Europe and speak multiple languages, giving us exposure to many different cultures and the ability to take the strong points from each. This is part of what gives us an eye for quality and design. We are always on the lookout for new brands to bring to our store to bring a more complete and expansive range of ethical, sustainable cork items to one place so that you can incorporate the incredible material that is cork into many aspects of your life. We especially take pride in bringing brands from Europe to the US that otherwise don't ship overseas or have little exposure to American audiences. We also aren't afraid to grow and recognize if older products don't meet our ever-evolving standards. We're hoping to be able to bring several new brands to our store this year!

6. Always Staying True to Our Store Values and Personal Values

Above all, we believe in valuing life on earth. That includes the environment, animals, and human rights. We think it is possible to put a stop to pollution, animal exploitation, the use of fossil fuels, and human suffering without sacrificing anything that we enjoy in modern society. We believe that the earth provides enough for every man's need, but not every man's greed. We respect nature and recognize ourselves as a part of nature. You can be sure that shopping at our store means supporting a business that promotes ethical commerce, circular material production, defending of human rights, a clean environment, and protecting the animals from the cruelty inherent in using them as products.

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Here's to a high-energy year in 2022 and progress toward a more equal and just society and a cleaner, healthier planet. 

All the best,

Lindsay