A Sad Announcement of Our Closure

To the faithful,

It is with a heavy heart that The Root Collective is closing our doors. It’s been 10.5 years of working in the fair trade and ethical fashion space and unfortunately, our fight has to end. It’s become abundantly clear in the last 2 years that we can no longer compete with the fast fashion world.

From the start, we have run our business on extremely thin margins. The lack of budget has meant that we’ve had to grow very slow in order to not take on investors or go into debt. While we’ve managed both of those things, if we wanted to continue, that would be our only option. And it wouldn’t be fair to my family.

Few fair trade founders talk about the extreme personal sacrifice it takes to run a business like this. None of us are making much money. At all. We are all putting blood, sweat and tears into something we believe in, in creating a better world. But at some point, the sacrifice becomes too much. I cannot keep asking my family to not have the best version of me while I’m barely able to help contribute financially and often, emotionally.

We will be shutting down over the next several month, starting with liquidating our finished inventory in our warehouse next week. After that, I’m not 100% sure how things will go but we will be offering preorders to try to recoup our costs on raw materials.

If you want the long explanation, please join our Insiders group on facebook to see the live video I posted this week.

Thank you to ALL of you for your support over the last 10 years. It means more than you will ever know.

Please stay tuned for details in the coming weeks.

XO, Bethany