A Word From the Owners: A Year in Review
What a year.
It feels as though we went from celebrating the Superbowl in February straight into quarantine and now it’s Christmas. It’s been a year defined by grief and anxiety, education and introspection, and hopefully by reevaluation and action.
The loss of life we’ve experienced is simply incomprehensible. The personal devastations of being unable to hug a loved one one last time have been overwhelmed by the sheer magnitude of the statistics. Perhaps this is the way we collectively protect ourselves, our societal fight-or-flight defense, guarding us against the unbearable sadness. How quickly tragedy tries to normalize.
Our hearts go out to all those who’ve lost someone, to all those who’ve missed birthdays and reunions, to those who haven’t held their grandchildren yet, and to those who are sick, be it from the disease itself or the symptoms of a catastrophic pandemic. We grieve for all of our neighbors and we celebrate them. We salute the frontline essential workers who too often go underpaid, underappreciated, and underprotected. This must change. We thank our teachers who face larger classrooms with higher expectations and less resources. And to our Black and Brown Kansas Citians, we apologize. For far too long, racism has been ignored, implicit bias denied, and BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, and People of Color) voices muted. What a year of reckoning.
There’s no better illustration than a highly contagious pandemic to make crystal clear the fact that we are only as healthy as our sickest neighbors.
America is history’s greatest superpower. We are the world’s most advanced civilization in terms of technology, but in terms of humanity? We cannot keep telling ourselves that we’ve come far enough. Progress slowed a long time ago. Our economy, our governance, our day-to-day culture of respect and decency and empathy has not kept pace. Today, there are too many Americans who have died. Too many are food insecure. Too many are overworked. And too many face eviction.
As the country’s richest 50 citizens now own more wealth than the bottom 50% of our citizens, we must stop and reassess. Made in KC and Amazon are governed by mostly the exact same laws, but Made in KC pays more taxes each year. The minimum wage is not a liveable wage.
This pandemic has forced us to rethink our priorities and the power of our purchases. As some of our favorite restaurants close their doors for good, we rethink where to spend our dollar. We reassess supply chains as food shortages in one region run concurrent with the surpluses in another. Meanwhile the lines at food banks grow to unfathomable lengths.
As a primarily brick-and-mortar retailer, Made in KC was impacted much like the rest of the industry. We shuttered our stores for months and made furlough phone calls we’d never imagined. We felt our promise to our employees had been broken. Yet, once the Paycheck Protection Program was announced, we rehired as quickly as possible, ensured there had been no gap in employees’ income, and even covered employees who’d been ineligible for unemployment. It’s been a roller coaster.
The last year has required longer hours, harder conversations, and more creativity than ever before (and that’s coming from a brick-and-mortar retail start-up that just turned five). We launched into a number of initiatives to better our business, our employees, and our community. Most notably we teamed up with Sandlot Goods to produce face masks for hospitals, schools, first responders, homeless shelters, and nursing homes. At the time of this writing, we’ve produced well over 175,000 face masks. We helped raise money for local restaurants and local Black Lives Matter organizations. We retrained our entire staff on new coronavirus protocols, and added hazard pay and paid sick leave for all hourly employees. We’ve added diversity training and committed to breaking down racially unjust systems. We launched virtual book clubs to encourage purchasing from local bookstores, and ran a constant campaign of hope and positivity.
This pandemic has been a personal struggle and a collective one. It’s sparked anger at our systems and our leaders and at the things outside our control. Now, more than ever, we must commit to a new, brighter, more inclusive future. We must commit ourselves to doing better, to being better. At Made in KC, now more than ever, we are committed to our employees. We are committed to our makers and artists. We are committed to our city.
Thank you for your support, thank you for your resiliency,
—Keith Bradley, Tyler Enders, Thomas McIntyre
