It’s Friday the Thirteenth and we’re in a weird place so this note is long.
It’s our birthday! We’re celebrating 13 years of Moop this week. We had this whole idea around feeling lucky when we realized there was a Friday the 13th this March. 13 years, 13 candles, you get it…we thought it was gonna be great. But, we didn’t know when we planned this that we’d actually be working from a place of lots of anxiety about Covid-19. A very real, very scary global situation. It’s as easy to get caught up in the news articles as it is the memes. Which just leaves us all in a strange place. We laugh, we bite our nails, we try not to be over zealous at the grocery store, we wash our hands. We’ve been empathizing with our friends in Seattle, in food service, in small business, watching as the world responds to this pandemic. I’ve been stressing about my daughter, who lives and works in the Pike Place Market. You can imagine the helplessness. I think a lot of you are in a similar place.
Through all of this, we are still celebrating 13 years of small business! For thirteen years we have made tens of thousands of bags. At least 13 people have worked with me over the years (maybe more?), and just about every single one of them have been people I would love to run into again today. I feel so lucky that the best people on the planet have helped me make this tiny business what it is.
Moop started with me, in my apartment in Western Massachusetts, with an $80 sewing machine that I had been using to make props for photographs I was staging and an accidental bag that started as a dress because I didn’t actually know how to sew but was desperately trying to find a direction for myself at a period of huge transition after grad school that happened to coincide with a huge transition in e-commerce and put me on a path I didn’t know was available to me.
So much has changed since then.
Like, my whole entire life has changed since then.
The only constant has been Moop, my daughter and my cat. This business has been a grounding force, has shaped my professional career, grown my creative skill set, has become a huge part of my identity, allowed me to be a contributor to my adopted city of Pittsburgh, a contributor to the maker/design/build community and given me the opportunity to be a job creator during a decade that re-defined what a job could be. It’s really hard for all of us at Moop to imagine our world without it. I hope we don’t have to. While we have seen traffic to our downtown storefront completely disappear (Covid-19 is not even present in Pittsburgh yet, but precautions are underway), we’re hoping you’ll remember to support your favorite small businesses online, including us! But, really, the people who make things, serve things, service things, build things, deliver things, generally all of your working class heroes who add joy and value to your day to day life are being or will be economically affected by this.
Thanks for reading my plea. We work really hard to do what we do, in the way that we do, and we want to keep doing it.
We’ve got lots of new things. Special edition new things, even!
This message is already too long, so you can see them online. But, there’s a Backpack no.4 in waxed canvas, new self care from Daughter of the Land, a custom embroidered new beach bag that we only made a few of that won’t be released until Saturday because I’m typed this out at 2am and I have not photographed it yet so keep an eye out then, plus we have new bag blankets and soap! We have soap!
And, you can use the code: LUCKYTHIRTEEN for 15% off your entire order.
Many thanks and so much love and lots of hand washing,
Wendy & co.
