Our Amazon Boycott And How It Influenced Our New Start-Up

An Amazon Boycott Driving A Start-Up On A Mission

Originally published in March 2019. This is the founders' account of Friendly Turtle's beginnings. References to the age of the business, shopping decisions and charity commitments describe that period, not current policies.

Amazon Marketplace—you couldn't fault the convenience we experienced. With Amazon Prime, our orders could arrive by the next day, sometimes even the same evening. My fiancée, Amy, and I would buy everything from Amazon—we were hooked.

Believe it or not, we're not actually trying to sell their services to you. Quite the opposite for that matter. It became apparent, around two years before we wrote this article, that with all this convenience must come a cost. Yes, we could get everything that we wanted super-fast, at prices that were difficult to match; but with our choice to buy cheap and at the most convenient every single time, no other retailer, online or on the high street, would ever get a look in.

Say we weren't alone in our shopping habits, buying fast and cheap off Amazon. Say other people actually did this too. We worried about what that might mean for the independent retailers on our high streets if those habits continued. We wanted more than a future of restaurants, charity shops and coffee shops. So our Amazon boycott commenced…

Amazon Boycott For More Ethical & Eco Retailers

We pledged to stop buying goods from Amazon about 18 months before we started our company. As we became more aware of the amount of single-use plastics from supermarkets and most retailers, so came a realisation of how much packaging waste accompanied our own online orders. Reports about working conditions also concerned us at the time. Taken together, these issues made us question whether our shopping habits matched our environmental and ethical priorities. So we started an Amazon boycott and opted to shop at and promote more sustainable retailers and brands that shared our values.

For readers considering packaging waste today, the US Environmental Protection Agency recommends buying items with minimal packaging and choosing reusable options where practical.

We both noticed more and more of these brands on Instagram advocating the way of living we hoped to live by. As we started trying to live more sustainably, we noticed there were lots of others out there that had awesome ideas and products to help us out on our journey. We started following them and sharing their inspiring ideas. It was like there was a buzz around the subject as more people shared their ideas for a more sustainable lifestyle, and there was a genuine movement of people trying to live more ethically and sustainably.

These inspiring brands often came in the form of small, new businesses, and we started to shop with the little guys to support them wherever we could. To us, these small businesses often seemed to have a strong set of values and a genuine motivation to help reduce the waste we had all been creating. And we loved them.

An inspirational blog called Consciously Inspired also used to write content that opened our eyes to living more ethically. Those pieces were part of the inspiration behind our early journey.

Humble Beginnings

Believe it or not, we never started our new ethical and eco-conscious company in spite of Amazon and their world domination. It wasn't like there was a lightbulb moment that pinged on and we thought we would take on the online beast. No. Friendly Turtle came from a genuine desire to help reduce the amount of unnecessary plastic and waste that was a by-product of just about everyone's life.

The first beginnings were when Amy and I tried to reduce our own environmental footprint; reducing the amount of waste we had going to landfill and trying to look after our oceans, environment and climate a little better.

Cue the birth of Friendly Turtle…

We felt inspired by the amount of eco and ethical brands on the market and we jumped at an opportunity to try and help others on the same journey we had made. I built our website whilst Amy reached out to these brands with the possibility of stocking their products. It was very exciting and very daunting, with a very sharp learning curve and lists to the ceiling of things we had to get done.

Positive Progress Sticking True To Our Values

At the time of writing, we were four months into our new business venture, and really pleased with the momentum and feedback we'd had. We were growing our customer base, and our product catalogue was growing each week, including reusable coffee cups.

Our range also included eco-friendly lunch boxes for taking meals out and about.

For personal care, customers could explore natural and organic skincare.

We also offered eco-friendly gifts for people looking for more thoughtful presents.

Our 2019 charity commitment was to donate 10% of profits to Surfers Against Sewage and their work to clean up our oceans and beaches. Scuba diving was a passion of ours, and we'd seen some pretty nasty stuff floating around in our oceans—so these guys resonated with us. This describes the pledge made at that time, not a current donation promise.

We were still continuing our Amazon boycott, building our customer base and growing sales independently of the Amazon Seller platform. But the question of working with brands that sold through Amazon caused us no end of moral dilemmas. The biggest problem with a new start-up e-commerce shop is driving traffic to your website and getting your products in front of new customers. Trust us, we knew how difficult this was initially, and moving forward.

Part of our process when searching for new products and brands to work with was reviewing their ethical and environmental values. If we believed they were working towards something meaningful and doing so in a responsible way, then it was a match and we reached out to stock their products. The problem we so often saw was that lots of new and exciting brands had products we loved, but also operated on Amazon as a means to sell more. Of course you can't blame anyone for wanting to increase sales and profits. For us, the dilemma was how to balance support for those brands with the shopping choices we had made ourselves.

We faced this dilemma regularly: an inspiring brand sold a product which appeared to tick the right environmental boxes, but it was also selling through Amazon. What should we do? We wanted to stock the product because we loved it and believed our customers would love it too, but wondered how that fitted with our own commitments. It was a tough one. Selling through a particular marketplace alone does not establish a brand's environmental or ethical performance.

For a practical way to assess environmental claims today, the Green Claims Code for shoppers encourages consumers to question vague claims and ask businesses for supporting information.

What Do You Think Of Our Amazon Boycott?

Even after two years of avoiding shopping on Amazon, and after setting up a company selling online independently of it, we were still faced with these ethical decisions. We weren't continuing our boycott simply because Amazon was competition—we believed there was room for all of us and loved seeing other companies succeed. The issue for us was wanting to support companies and brands whose practices matched the values we cared about.

We would LOVE to hear your views and opinions on the topic. It can be quite a controversial topic at times, but we are genuinely interested in what other people think. How do you balance convenience, support for independent businesses and the evidence behind a retailer's environmental claims? Thanks for reading!