Rachel Kelly, Thought’s founder and creative director, on Thoughtful Friday

We started thoughtful Friday back in 2015, as one of the first early adopters of choosing to show a more thoughtful approach to Black Friday. It was important to us to practice what we preach in terms of a more mindful and conscious approach to consuming. Particularly at such a peak busy time for our customers; their inboxes are full, they’re being bombarded with messages and we wanted to remain true to ourselves by encouraging the philosophy of buying better and buying less.

Thoughtfulness for me means not setting myself really difficult targets but trying to consume in a more mindful and thoughtful way. So if I’m thinking about buying a pair of shoes, I’m thinking are they functional, are they going to be fit for purpose for a long time, I’m looking at the quality of the fabrications, the way it was made, and really looking to the company to make sure they align with my values.

Thoughtfulness is a really key catch phrase here at thought, and it’s something we look at across our business. Whether its manufacturing the garments, how we operate as a team, how we interact with our customers, how we form long-term partnerships with our supply-chain. And thoughtfulness to me, as someone who is a business operator, working in this really challenging climate, is that we try to remain as kind and calm and outward looking as possible, and really putting ourselves in our customer’s shoes in trying to offer brilliant product that is kind to our customer and the planet.

I’m really proud of the impact that we’ve been able to have through thoughtful Friday. A big highlight for me was the first year we started it – 2015 - we were able to work with The Wonder Foundation. Through the donation we were able to make as a result of our Thoughtful Friday campaign, we supported and mentored the vocational training for 280 women, which is such meaningful and impactful work. When we worked with the woodland trust in 2019, we had an aim of planting about 1500 trees which was offsetting about 340 tonnes of carbon, which is a huge amount. And over the years we have worked with so many fantastic organisations doing really important work, it’s something I look forward to every year.

Across the board what we’re looking to do is work with organisations who are at ground level, making meaningful impact in people’s lives or looking to do something that positively impacts the environment and the environment around them.

Since we launched thoughtful Friday seven years ago, there’s obviously a lot more noise in this space and it’s great to see lots of founder led businesses looking to do black Friday in a different way. With the current climate as it is, the cost of living crisis and a difficult year – difficult few years, we wanted to do something a bit more meaningful and responsive to our customers lives. So the week of thoughtfulness felt really authentic to our business this year. We wanted to be able to interact with our customers on a daily basis, and I just loved the idea of having these little moments in time with our customer, each day of the week, that felt like we were just sprinkling a little bit of joy.

Find out more about what we have done over past Thoughtful Fridays