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~ Coffee Corner ~

offee or tea? When and how? and which can also be recycled again. In addition, our shipping
‘Definitely, tea. I am absolutely not a coffee drinker. boxes are 100% recycled and recyclable. It’s a small change but
CHowever, I often travel to Italy, since our products are stuff like that matters in the long run.
produced there. In Italy, coffee is a big part of the culture. So,
when I am in Italy, I drink coffee.’ A last and important aspect of sustainability, as I define it, is
making sure we can continue doing what we do on the long
What distinguishes Mason Garments from other shoe run. Focussing on, and optimizing our e-commerce over the
brands? last years really had an effect that we could never have foreseen.
‘Mason Garments distinguishes itself in the field of quality. Our successful webshop made sure we had no loss of income
Currently, we are the only shoe brand in the Netherlands that during the first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic. As one of
produces 100% of their shoes in Italy. In addition, sourcing the only companies in our field, we were completely able to
is also carried out in Italy. This creates a quality difference in keep our business running as usual without any support from
how the shoes are produced. This allows us to guarantee the the Dutch government.
quality of the shoes and meet the expectations of customers.
Furthermore, we distinguish ourselves in the field of business Last year, you experienced exponential growth. Why
operations. Mason Garments is completely independent, as did you experience this growth, and how did you deal
we do not have any investors. This is our core identity. Growth with this in the area of customer experience?
for the sake of growth is not what Mason Garments stands ‘Thanks to the quality and word of mouth, we have experienced
for. We want to experience growth because the products are even more growth in the first half of 2020. We want to give
getting better and because more consumers are interested in all customers a good customer experience. We have partly
our products.’ relinquished customer service, and this makes scaling much
more possible. We are not a customer service agency; we focus
How important is sustainability to you, and how do more on our business and strategy. Outsourcing has been a
you guarantee the quality of your shoes at the same wise choice because we could still focus on the strategy.’
time?
Sustainability consists of several aspects. It is important to How do your cross-border service levels go in terms of
distinguish which aspects there are and how people define delivery?
them. We focus on three aspects of sustainability; the lifespan ‘We have been working with the same logistics partner for a
of our products and our company as a whole, the sustainability long time now. They work exclusively for us. This ensures that
of our production processes and the environmental and societal we will never be pushed back because another, bigger client has
impact. priority. We still have the greatest focus on Western Europe.
However, we try to ensure that we check carefully which
We want our products to have a long lifespan. Therefore, we logistics flow is best for each country or area. We will attune
can produce on a smaller scale. We prefer not to produce and ourselves to this per country or per area. This means that we
sell a lot of shoes due to hype in the short term and then will not use the same courier across Europe or around the
disappear from the market in five years because the hype is world. It depends on which courier suits the country best.’
over. Another definition of sustainability is the production
process. I am not only talking about how our shoes are And what are the biggest pitfalls?
produced, but also about important things such as employee ‘You have to learn which logistics partner is the most reliable
working conditions. What you see is that certain factories still in which country and which suits your company best. One
get workers from low-wage countries to work in European may be cheaper, but in some cases, the packages may not even
countries. Then a company can still say that they produce in arrive at the customer. We experienced this with a courier in
Europe, but this does not mean that the working conditions Germany, which we had worked with for a while. However,
are at a good level. We care about the working conditions of at some point, we noticed that we were getting more orders
our partners and within our own office. The third aspect is the from Germany. As a result, we got many more questions
product itself and the packaging. We always have rubber soles about where some packages went. While, on our side, we
under our shoes as they have a longer lifespan. In addition, always packed and shipped the package within 24 hours. It
we check whether our suppliers are affiliated with the Leather then sometimes took up to two weeks before the consumer
Working Group or other bodies that monitor sustainability. had his or her package. It turned out that the partner we
worked with was not reliable enough. We then chose to
When it comes to packaging, our current shoeboxes are made switch to another courier. After that, we have had almost no
of recycled paper materials with a glossy layer. Because they complaints about the shipping.’ ••
are made from recycled materials but are not fully recyclable,
we currently do not consider our shoeboxes to be sufficiently
sustainable by our standards. Therefore, we are developing new
shoeboxes, which are completely made from recycled paper

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