Mondays Are For Reflection

Molly Designs has been on a bit of a journey these past 12 months. The pandemic has encouraged me to challenge why I wanted to start my own business. I began dabbling with loose ideas years ago but always found being employed by other companies getting in my way. August 2019, I took the plunge to leave my full time job and embrace a new journey with Molly Designs.

I started by putting all my energy into producing work for weddings; mostly wedding stationery and table plans etc. But since the pandemic hit, obviously weddings and everything else got cancelled. Which meant I had to reevaluate what I can do instead and adjust.

Let’s now skip to April 2021, when I took a course with @thesocialteacup in learning how to use instagram better as a business. Gina (founder of The Social Teacup) opened my eyes up to so much in just a small amount of time. Not only does she give amazing instagram advice, but also really vital advice and coaching on your business WHY and making you sit down with yourself for a self chat and find out what it is about your business which makes you stand out from the crowd.

So here goes:

This past year and especially the last few months, I have taken a strong interest in how I impact the environment and I have been recognising how what I can do to make a difference on the impact I create.

I’ve always had an interest in marine life as well as art since when I watched Free Willy as a kid. Since then killer whales have always been my favourite animal. Because of this interest I’ve been looking more into the plastic pollution within the ocean and how it’s affecting our marine life. Recently, I watched Seaspiracy which is a really hard watching but incredibly eye-opening documentary about the plastic pollution in the ocean.

According to the documentary, there are a lot of different environmental factors which are proving detrimental to the oceans ecosystem. Partially, our individual plastic pollutions but mostly it’s down to large fishing boats overfishing in the waters which is causing the most devastation.

As a collective, we will all have to do our bit. For me as an individual, and as a business I am adapting my lifestyle to prevent the impending disaster. As a person I’m going to cut down on my fish consumption. If we stop consuming so much fish, big companies won’t have the need to keep overfishing and we also won’t have the need to create fish farms which doesn’t provide us with healthy fish anyway. As a business I’ve already been taking the steps towards being plastic free and I’ve adopted a low-waste strategy to ensure that I keep lowering my impact on the environment.

As a business, I’ve changed how I package my products. Back in 2019 when I went full time as Molly Designs I was using cellophane packets to package my card designs. Towards the end of 2020, I transitioned my packaging to only plastic-free. This year, I have developed the strategy with my products as well and now I only source organic materials when producing work. This is proving to be to be more costly for me as a small business in the short term however I feel it’s important that I show my commitment to this movement.

In the future, I am hopeful to start outsourcing from thrift and charity shops good quality clothing which I can reuse to create bags, pouches, purses etc. By doing this, I hope Molly Designs can contribute to the slowdown of the fast fashion industry thus reducing the amount of plastic fabric pollution within the oceans in the long term.