What happened to Minimal Packaging?

Soft Star has always had an option for customers to choose"minimal packaging" as part of their checkout process on the Internet. This meant that instead of having your shoes packed in a branded Soft Star gift box AND a mailing box, your shoes would simply be put directly in the mailing box (like this picture). In both examples, if there is extra room in the shipping box, we fill it with recycled paper that is reclaimed from our local newspaper printer to keep things snug and safe in the box.

A few weeks back, the "minimal packaging" check box disappeared from the website and we immediately started getting emails from concerned customers. What happened?! The great news is the reason the check box came off the website is because we internally made the decision to change our default shipping to MINIMAL, and only to include the Soft Star gift box if requested. We felt it was more important from an environmental perspective to have minimal packaging as our default and to simplify decisions for customers in the shopping cart then to ship our branded box with each and every children's pair of shoes. You can imagine we had some concerns... would we be losing opportunities with new customers to re-enforce our brand name? Would new customers think it was "tacky" to have their shoes arrive just wrapped in paper? etc.... but after some good discussions we decided that minimal packaging was more important than the concerns raised. The not-so-great news is we didn't communicate this information with our customers and therefore raised concerns that minimal was going away. No, no, no... not going away but here to stay! Should be a jingle or something! We actually were really excited that people noticed the check box went away - this further confirmed that our company goals and efforts to minimize our ecological footprint are in line with our customers.

The second picture here shows an example of our Soft Star gift box which can be requested for children's shoes sizes 13 or smaller when the shoe is placed in the shopping cart. Many customers like this box for storage or for gift giving - so it is still an option - just no longer the default.

Soft Star Shoes is a family friendly company located in Corvallis, Oregon. Viewpoints in this blog are those of individual workshop elves, and do not necessarily represent those of www.SoftStarShoes.com