We were sailing off the Baja Coast, rounding the Island of Cedros on our voyage home after the Newport — Cabo race. It was beautiful, if not a little boring. I found myself thinking a great deal about how to marry unwavering idealism with practical strategies to empower and enable greener living. I meditated on our brand, what the essence of Albatross Designs distilled down to. At the core, we want to sell sustainable products that inject a little soul into otherwise mundane activities. My train of thought was interrupted as we came upon another team’s boat making the same journey back from the race. They were moving at a leisurely pace, probably enjoying the scenery of the island coast. We sailed...
This past holiday season we traveled to Lago di Como in northern Italy and Aracta, California to explore design styles and connect with the outdoors a bit to find inspiration for the coming year. The Italy trip was fantastic, and we discovered some amazing Italian housing construction styles that we would like to incorporate into coming designs. Beyond the incredible modern styles that Italy is famous for, it's older designs are still quite spectacular. For example, take Como's Villa Gaeta below. Simply a magnificent example of Como's timeless style and in many ways similar to our razor's classic design. It was a remarkably warm holiday in Como this year... which made our boat trip more comfortable, but scared...
Write 500 words or less and Enter to Win a $75 Shaving Set. Please forward to your friends! Single Use Plastic is necessarily being phased out of human life, but unfortunately not very quickly. Some places like California and India have taken bold steps to call a spade a spade and prohibit the use of various single use plastic items. Other states are happy to make and sell such items, but that doesn’t make it right. The equivalent of 1 large dump truck of plastic is being dumped into the ocean every minute. Without major changes this number is expected to grow to 2 dump trucks per minute by 2030. Clearly, things need to change. By enabling the mass...
Albatross SHAVES the World from Plastic, those stainless steel tools of mass and sharpness, are safer than your plastic razors. Many of you know this, but many others are actually “intimidated” by our blades. Don't be intimidated! Here’s the thing. Plastic razor companies have gone through great lengths to make you believe DE safety razors are scary, but it’s just not true. First a bit of deductive reasoning-- since I personally switched to the double edged safety razor I have cut myself less, in fact, only twice in a very long time compared to the regular nicks I’d get with plastic cartridge razors. There’s a better reason for you to believe us though: engineering. But first, we must...
Sustainability Challenges: Alternative Packaging and the Idea of Green by Default As our effort known as Albatross SHAVES the World from Plastic progresses we have been striving to get in more retail stores. For small stores our standard fiber bag solution has worked brilliantly as a packaging means because it is quite easy to simply take the bags off the shelf and glance inside. As we approach what I will call ‘stores with aisles,’ which as you know sell plastic razors, we are often confronted with a resistance to our own resistance to using plastic packaging at stores. Stores with aisles specifically often make 2 main points: Customer must see the razor itself [This means we can’t simply place the...
