What a month it’s been! Time seems to fly by these days, so we wanted to pause and take a second to recap the debut of our second subscription box.
Our “BIPOC Box” was first delivered to subscribers on August 1, 2020, and exclusively features makers who are Black, Indigenous, and People of Color.
“BIPOC” stands for Black, Indigenous, and People of Color
This box was particularly important to us for a few reasons:
First, with the current political climate, we felt it was necessary to take a stand against racism in our region. We believe that the diversity of the Inland Northwest is one of the most beautiful parts about where we live, and we plan to work even harder to keep it that way.
We released our first box around June 1, 2020, which was right around the time when country-wide protests against police brutality of people of color started to gain momentum. After taking a hard look at the representation of makers in our “Welcome Box,” we realized that we were doing a disservice to our region by only featuring White makers in our inaugural subscription box. We can do better.
As anti-racist White allies, we believe it is more important than ever to uplift BIPOC communities and provide a platform by which BIPOC makers can better share their craft with our region.
For this reason, we worked diligently to find the best high-quality products made in our region by Black, Indigenous, and People of Color who are also makers.
Experiencing delays or lost mail from USPS? Us too…
Second, recent delays in the US Postal system made it especially difficult to coordinate this box.
No hate to USPS because we understand they are doing their best with the resources they have been given, but it was pretty frustrating. One of our wholesale orders was straight-up lost by USPS (and then found, and delivered to us almost two weeks later), and delivery times were super delayed by the lack of allocated resources to crucial services like USPS.
Because of the delays, we received two of our wholesale orders as late as July 31st, which was the day before our first round of “BIPOC Boxes” were due for delivery. Yikes!
Luckily, everything arrived just in time to fulfill our orders and hand-deliver our second INW Trading Co. subscription box on August 1st!
Finally, can we talk about how freakin’ gorgeous this month’s box is?! Each of the items in this month’s box brings us so much joy, and we are so pleased with how it all came together.
If you received your “BIPOC Box” on August 1st or 15th, make sure to check your email for a feedback survey from us asking about your overall experience and the individual items in your box. We always appreciate feedback and knowing what our subscribers do and don’t like.
