We owe our existence as a tea enthusiasts, as a company, as a society to the bounty that Nature grants us. Cross-border e-commerce is very inefficient in many ways—while it gives us the benefit of easily gathering the largest variety of artisanal Japanese teas currently available anywhere on or offline, shipping separately directly to customers around the world utilizes more carbon emissions than shipping a large amount of a single product to a single store.

This has always bothered me, and finally, we're addressing this issue by utilizing Offset, a program by our e-commerce Shopify, that automatically calculates the carbon emissions generated by the shipping of orders to customers. Package weight x shipping distance is the formula that Offset uses to calculate our carbon emissions per order, and to offset those emissions we donate to certified forest projects via Pachama that "reduces carbon, restores wildlife, and supports local communities."

Rather than promoting our participation of this program as unique feature of our business, we want you to know that participation was super easy, and hope you will encourage other Shopify-based businesses to participate if they don't already have a program of their own. Just send them to Offset and they should be able to install the program on their own store in a matter of seconds.

Image credit: Pachama website screenshot