Nice that you are here again and read this blog! This week was packed with FUN and because its exactly one year I’m living in Spain. Not necessarily the easiest year to move to Spain with the independence issues in October last year and then Covid of course and the total lockdown here in Barcelona, ​​but … even with these difficult situations I look back on a great first year. The Spanish web shop opened on January 1 and we had the first Spanish customer on January 2. This may sound a bit exaggerated to you, but I really had tears in my eyes at the time. So happy. It is all still in its infancy here, but after 8 months in Spain, the engine starts running! I live in my eyes, in the most beautiful apartment in Barcelona and enjoy the light every day, “the lamp” which is always on and I have not had a winter coat on once in the past year. How nice is that? I am happy here!

But this week there was even more fun. I received the production of our new web shop shipping bags at my office. And these are 100% biodegradable. Bio what? Well … 100% biodegradable. But then really! After 6 weeks this “plastic” can be degraded into compost and has no residual effect on the environment. It just disappears! Very often it is said to be 100% biodegradable but is not really biodegradable. There is a lot of cheating with this term. That is why it took me a lot of time to find the right partner. Because I also wanted to contribute to the environment with All-time Favourites. At the moment we also use pink shipping bags, but these are made of PET plastic. And these are not good for the environment. This didn’t feel right. If we encourage you to buy an ATF bag so that you don’t need plastic bags in the supermarket anymore, we shouldn’t deliver the ATF shoppers in plastic bags, right?

I know Luigi from my old shoe network. He brought Timberland to Europe in the mid-1980s. I think a man of around 60 who tells me the best stories about the business as it used to be. Via Timberland he came to Geox, Lotto, Vivobarefoot, Inditex, Puma and others. His company saw how much packaging in the shoe and apparel business consists of plastic and wanted to change that. In 2006 he established a company in Munich that helps the major shoe labels to eliminate plastic in packaging and labeling. Every time on LinkedIn I saw that he won one award after another and one after the other official hallmarks. Maybe I should give him a call.

After chatting for an hour, we started talking about what we could do together. His company hadn’t done shipping bags before, but he wanted to take on this challenge with me. One prototype after another was made: the seams tore on one. The adhesive edge did not stick well with the other. Until this week the approved bags finally arrived. We were able to make these bags entirely according to your own wishes. In our own ATF color pink. With “ALL-TIME FUN STARTS NOW” on the front. That starts when the package arrives at your home, we think. And then when you open the back, you read about the pink bag. We hope you feel even more feelgood at All-time Favorites!

They will arrive in our warehouse at the end of September and all web shop orders will from now on be sent in this bag. Will you let me know what you think as soon as you get the new shipping bag in your hands? 

Enjoy your weekend!

Love Brechje