4 min read

Constructing our identity begins with identifying and articulating our values. Values are the foundation of our identity.

Just Mystic’s values, and consequently, our identity, is founded on three, in particular: quality, experimentation, and philanthropy.

Naturally, we value many things. Three values are just three values in a world of many. But with personal reflection and collective discourse, we arrived at three that have discernible meaning, while aligning with the needs of our business. 

On the face of it, our business is a simple one. We’re designing and selling apparel, or even more simply, shirts. Dig a little deeper and it’s much more, and, really, it’s only the limits of our creativity that govern how expansive we make this business. 

Start with selling shirts. This is where our first value, quality, is especially germane. We must execute and deliver high quality in the shirts we sell, from the materials in the shirts to the buying experience wherever the shirts are sold. It’s this span, from materials to purchasing that make up the consumer experience. We want this experience to be the highest quality possible. Thus the material quality must be great. The design quality has to be equally great. And then there’s the experience that the customer (you!) has in their interactions with our brand. Not only the buying experience but also the feeling the customer gets when seeing our marketing, when interacting with us in-store or online. All of these interactions must be designed with quality in mind. And ultimately, when we think about quality, we think about the consumer experience. We think: How might we deliver the highest-quality consumer experience? As we seek to answer this question, we see that selling shirts isn’t so simple. It has layers. 

It gets more complex as we think about innovation, or rather, how we continue to evolve all that we do at a pace that allows us to remain interesting and competitive. To remain out on the edge, continuously evolving, we must experiment. Hence, the origin of experimentation as a core value, essential to our identity, essential to our existence. As with the consumer experience, we experiment across a broad value chain with many activities. Some of the activities are experiments with marketing platforms and different channels to reach consumers. There’s also experimentation in the products we create, physical or digital. Shirts, yes, let’s experiment with different materials, different designs, and different perspectives. But what about farther out on the edge? What about NFTs and the Metaverse? What’s out there? How can we create a different consumer experience in that space? Well, let’s experiment to find out. Out on the edges of experimentation, there are more layers. 

Now we can’t be doing all of this work without consequences. We’re building a business that consumes materials and energy. We encourage consumption so that we may profit. The full cost of our efforts extends well beyond what’s accounted for in contemporary accounting practices. There’s a toll, a cost, or a tax perhaps that we must pay to account for our impact on the planet. We can choose more sustainable materials for our clothing and packaging. We can buy carbon credits to offset our footprint. We can reduce our energy use in our warehouse. And these are all things that we’ll do. But we must do more, we must give more. And literally we will give more. We’ll give at least 1% of our sales to environment nonprofits. We’ll also drop collections in direct support of raising money for specific causes. In a world of haves and have nots, and a world of for-profits and not-for-profits, our philanthropy will help fill this gap. These are the layers of the business that are the most complex, but it’s in these layers, the deepest layers, that we find more than our values. It’s here that we find our purpose. 

Our values, indeed, are core to our identity. And when we go deeper into our identity, when we explore the layers of our identity, we get to our purpose, and we see that our values, ever important to the soul of a company, are in fact a path to our purpose.

Follow @justmysticshop to watch us navigate this path, and read more about our purpose in another blog post, Putting the planet first.