A Moment of Reflection

This has been a challenging year for everyone. We hope you’re continuing to take gentle care of yourself and others, and finding time to reset and recharge when you can. We want to thank you all for your unwavering support during this time. Our community is so important to us and we are forever grateful.

Thanks to you, we were able to continue working with our incredible artisan partners with zero cancelled orders. This meant that the namesake of our Yami collection, Yamerote Mengistu, was able to hire more staff in her local Addis Ababa community and can continue to create economic opportunities for women in a safe, respectful work environment.

We were delighted to be included in Remake’s recent transparency report as one of the 10 brands ‘leading the way’ with our sustainability efforts in the fashion industry. We are always looking for new ways to reuse and recycle and this month launched our Yami Backpack in Burlwood and Dijon, made from excess leather that would otherwise go to waste. Next year we will introduce even more styles crafted from repurposed leather, and will continue to experiment with our surplus materials.

In addition to further reducing our footprint, we are proud to continue our support of nonprofits and projects that enrich the communities we call home. We give 1% of our sales back to organizations that share our ethos and principles and this year was no different. Some of the projects we have donated to in 2020 include: Women's Fund at the Austin Community Foundation, which supports the economic security of women in Central Texas; the SAFE Alliance, which serves survivors of abuse and domestic violence in Austin; and local and national organizations that support Black Lives Matter including NAACP, Reclaim the Block, and the African American Youth Harvest Foundation. This year also marked the beginning of a collaboration with SurfearNEGRA, a non-profit that provides funding for girls of color to learn to surf in their local communities. We are supporting their goal to send 100 girls to surf camp by donating 50% percent of all SurfearNEGRA x Raven + Lily collection purchases back to the organization, and will continue to do so in 2021.

We relaunched the journal this year as a nourishing and inspiring space for our community, featuring interviews with women we love, recommendations to start a conversation, and musings on Austin and the places we call home. We hope you find it a comfort and, as always, invite you to share your musings with us. 

As the year draws to a close we are quietly optimistic about what lies ahead and excited to share more with you in the new year. 

We hope you have a wonderful holiday and wish you all the best for the New Year when it arrives.

Let’s continue to take gentle care of each other.

Love,

Raven + Lily