2018 – A Year at Seasalt

Seasalt Belfast, opened 29th September 2018

10 new shops

opened this year, including our first Northern Ireland shop in Belfast. We are now a team of 1000, at our design studios in Falmouth, our distribution centre in Redruth and in shops across the UK from Morpeth to the Isles of Scilly.

Find your nearest shop>

We’re on track to raise £50,000 for charity just from socks

since we started donating 20p for every pair of single socks sold to our charity partners Hospital Rooms and Mylor Sailability – that adds up to a staggering 250,000 pairs of socks since May!

Hospital Rooms is an arts and mental health charity, co-founded by Cornish curator Niamh White and artist Tim A Shaw, which brings extraordinary art to people in mental health units. You can read more about Hospital Rooms and our work with them here>

Mylor Sailability gives people with physical disabilities, learning difficulties or health impairments the opportunity to take part in sailing and powerboating activities. Find out more here>

Both of these partnerships will continue until 2020. We donate a minimum of £10,000 a year in addition to any other fundraising projects, like the 20p from Seasalt socks, and the donation of all profits from sales of our charity Christmas cards this year to Hospital Rooms.

Shop Seasalt socks>

Seasalt Volunteers at the Flicka Donkey Foundation

Over 850 hours volunteering

completed by our team members at the design studios and distribution centre in Cornwall for causes close to our hearts, since the launch of the Seasalt Volunteering Initiative.

This initiative, introduced in May this year, gives employees the opportunity to take an extra day’s paid leave to volunteer for charity. We’ve redecorated, gardened, repaired, painted and grafted throughout Cornwall, even helping some of our four-legged friends from donkeys to kittens, aiding a wide range of charities including Age UK, Falmouth, Royal Cornwall Hospital’s Trust’s Mermaid Centre, Truro, the Flicka Foundation donkey sanctuary, Cornwall Wildlife Trust and the RNLI to mention just a few. Volunteering can be undertaken individually or as part of a group, so it’s been a great opportunity for some team building too.

From 2019 the Volunteering Initiative will be rolled out to our shops as well, so all our employees across the UK will have a chance to participate.

Read more about the Seasalt Volunteering Initiative>

Refill your water bottle at Seasalt’s water fountains

270 water bottles refilled in just the first week

from Seasalt’s water fountain at our new Lytham shop.  We’ve installed water fountains at all of our newest shops including, Cambridge, Belfast, Tenby, Cribbs Causeway and Lytham, and if successful will roll this out to further shops in the future. Don’t forget you can always get your water bottle refilled at any of our shops – just ask a member of staff who’ll be happy to help.

5,720 milk bottles a year

will be saved since we switched to glass at our design studios and distribution centre in Cornwall. It’s a small change helping to reduce our plastic waste, that will hopefully make a big difference – especially given how much tea we drink every day in the office!

Milk in glass bottles from Treleague Dairy

Our milk is being supplied locally by Treleague Dairy near Coverack on the Lizard Peninsula. Glass milk bottles are manually filled and we’ve helped them implement a delivery system that without our support would not have been possible.

Read more about glass milk bottles at Seasalt here>

280,000 paper mailbags

have been sent out with your lovely Seasalt orders since we removed all plastic tape, bubble wrap and plastic mailbags from our deliveries earlier in 2018. Although this might not sound like much this will actually cut out 18 tonnes of single use plastics a year.

You’ll notice that the clothes themselves are still packaged in plastic bags – this is currently necessary to protect the items and make sure they are delivered to you in the best possible condition, but rest assured we are currently working on an alternative solution. We’re also aiming to remove all single use plastics from our packaging by the end of 2019, so keep an eye out for further changes over the next few months.

Find out more about sustainability at Seasalt here>

9,969 canvas shoppers

sold in aid of Disability Rights UK, featuring exclusive Cornwall-inspired designs by Sue Perkins, Ellise Chappell and Kelly Knox raising nearly £5,000.

We also raised an additional £3,350 for the Royal Cornwall Hospital Trust’s Mermaid Centre in Truro, home to the Cornwall Breast Screening Programme (NHS BSP) and the Oncoplastic Breast Unit, with a limited edition mermaid canvas shopper designed by Seasalt artist Jodie Matthews. Find out more here> 

The Leach Pottery Apprenticeship

This October Matt Foster, our second Leach Pottery apprentice sponsored by the Seasalt Bursary, graduated from his apprenticeship at the world renowned pottery in St Ives. Matt was selected in 2015 from hundreds of applicants and has trained alongside the skilled craftspeople at the pottery, guided by lead potter Roelof Uys.

Our third apprentice, Annabelle Smith, has just completed her first year at The Leach Pottery. Follow her journey so far, and take a look back at Matt’s apprenticeship here on the blog>

Along with developing a wide range of skills and their own personal style, our apprentices make all of the Leach mugs for Seasalt. Shop Leach Pottery>

None of this would have been possible without you, so we’d like to say a massive THANK YOU and wish you all the best for 2019.