Community Impact Report #3

Hey Canada! It’s been a minute since our last Community Impact Report and we are excited to share with you how we’ve continued to build community by giving back. We’ve had the honour of working with amazing people and businesses who are constantly creating impact within our beautiful city.  It’s been an incredible journey so far and we wouldn’t be where we are without the amazing participation from our beloved supporters, influencers, and local business owners. We’ve said it before, but sometimes it’s still overwhelming to us that people want to share and take part in our dream. The continual outpour of love, kindness and support for Local Laundry is unreal and we persist on thanking our community. We love that people want to get involved, get in with the community and get into a little trouble with us - we can’t thank everyone enough.

So, let’s dive into it.

Building Community - Supporting Local Charities

The most important impact we’ve put efforts towards is our monthly charitable donations. Each month we donate 10 per cent off our monthly profits to a charity of our consumers choice. We have donated to Federation of Calgary Communities ($270), Foothills Country Hospice ($300), Big Brothers & Big Sisters ($300), Grow Calgary ($400), Kids Up Front ($500), and Comries Sports Equipment Bank ($300) and will be donating to The Alex as well as 10% of our profits from our Community Collection from September to December. We've also given away tonnes of free gear as silent auction items to support some awesome causes like Tribe of Lambs  fundraising for HIV positive children in India, Curl with a Rock Jock for money to our Olympic and Paralympic Athletes, Dote Issue Fundraiser and many more!

So far to date, we have been able to donate close to $10,000 through cash and clothing donations to local charities across Alberta. 

For more information about how we build community by giving back check out our blog, ‘5 Ways We Build Community by Giving Back’

Every quarter we invite all our business owners and entrepreneur friends to come together for what we call Local Startup & Beers, where we all get together and see how we can help each other grow our own passion or business. At these events, everyone pays $10 for a ticket and nominates their favourite local charity. At the event, we randomly choose three of the nominated charities and everyone votes on one. The charity with the most votes gets all the money collected that evening. We donate 100% of the ticket proceeds to the winning charity. So far through our Startup & Beers, we’ve been able to donate $700 to Brown Bagging for Calgary Kids and $400 to Grow Calgary.

Want to come to our next Local Startup & Beers? Fire us an email, it will be on November 30th at Hustle Co. Workspace.

We had our first ever Local Laundry Volunteer Event this fall with spending the time with Believe In The Gold Run For Children’s cancer with our friends from Meraki Supply Co, Playfield, Crooz Coffee, and TreeEra!

We are having our Holiday Volunteer Event at the Calgary Interfaith Food Bank on the morning of Saturday, December 9th, 2017 let us know if you want to join!

Getting into Trouble - Collaborations

It’s clear to see that collaborations have exploded as more companies and people are reaching out to get into trouble with us - I mean who doesn’t love a photo shoot?!

Over the last few months, we’ve maintained our Calgary collaborations but also branched out into new cities such as Edmonton, Lethbridge, Toronto, and Halifax. Collaborations are hugely beneficial to all of the brands involved in the project and help to extend our reach into new communities and businesses, plus allow us to make amazing relationships along the way.

MSxLL from DANIEL EDWARD MEDIA on Vimeo.

Our collaborations have included: Violet Chocolate Company, Carissa Marie Photography, Dog Dog Goose, Leah & Stitch, Dollcious Beauty, Sara Jewell, Caramia Caramels, Allure Beauty By Chelsea, Young YEG, XX Balm, Succulent By Nature,  Alberta Boot Company, Market on 17th, U of C Basketball team, Staxx + Whistle Co, 11th Street Boutique, Novo Watches, Brewsters ‘Local Brew’, Eyedeology, True Buch, YYC Run + Lululemon collaboration, Trout & Taylor, Meals On Wheels, Wheel Estate, Bow River Rustic, Elevate Aerial Yoga, Pinnovate, Lucy Dunne, Whitney, Below The Belt, Stuff 4 Him, Jessalyn Wanlim, Ben Forhan, RAW Distillery, Alia from the Traveling Trotter and Alyssa Ficacco.

Collaborations have been an unreal way to meet and network with the people of YYC and the rest of the country to learn more about how they are doing business while impacting communities and making a difference.

Photographers

Collaborations are a way to create stunning and aesthetically appealing content for viewers, and it wouldn’t be possible without amazing photographers. Capturing the beautiful moments and telling visual stories has been done beautifully by the photographers we have been so fortunate to work with.

Some of the photographers we have had the pleasure of collaborating with over the last couple of months include: 7th Captures, Jed Lim Visuals, Dylan Free Solo, The lower 6th, Blondy Photography, Sophia Ritz, Tegan Dutton , Jesse Tamayo, Sue Moodie, Megan Curran, Andy Wood, Michel Feist, Angela So Photography, Picarth Photography, Tegan Dutton and Janet Davie.

Babes - Models

Collaborations are foolproof with our Local Laundry formula; collaborations = kickass photographer + amazing community builders + BABES! Big thank you to our models who gave us their best blue steel and Instagram worthy poses to give us the best looking Instagram page!

Some of the models we had out at our photoshoots have included Nicole Little, Lindsey Brown,, Amanda Dillabou, Claire Davie, Mark Bolger, Jon Tramble, Jon Lau, Lindsey Keans, Zandra, Sean Monahan, Style Concept Blog by Elena, Andrea Michelussi, Cassie Hawrysh, Made by Jemily, Lauren Grebinski, Ali Magee, Andréa Margarita, Claire Davie, Lucy Edwards, Briare Crawford, Katie Cellars, Sam Malach-Verlaan, Greg Coulas, Muna Moons, Ashley Ostridge, Victoria Szczesna, Reece Torode, Cole Torode, Davey Gravy, Kim, Rita Michaud, Bryton Udy, Annika Odegard, Sam Weerasekera, Emilie Fish, Lucy Skjarstad, DJ White Light, Kayla Zabot, Rebecca Zeran, Matthew Kendal, Sean Briggadoni and Suzy Kendrick. Rachel Antony, Jenna , Andrea , Dana Elyksa Claveria, Shaista, Michael, Ainsley Nicole, Andy and Katie Vincent.

Media

We’re always striving to share our story and the stories of our community builders and influencers. Anytime those stories are featured in various media outlets and other online magazines and blogs, we’re ecstatic! Some of the places we have been featured in over the past few months include the Calgary Metro, Calgary Herald, Calgary Sun, CTV, Ideas & Stuff Podcast, Sugar & Sam, Style Your Life, Trotting Traveler, and Daily Hive Calgary.

Special Projects

As you all know we’re in the business of building community with locally inspired apparel and doing our best every month to give back to charities across Canada. In the pursuit of inspiring communities, we launched the Traveling Sweater Campaign, both in Calgary during the spring and Edmonton over the summer. The Traveling Sweater Campaign was a sweater, or #communitycrew, that traveled with 15 different people in Calgary and 10 people in Edmonton, all by nomination. Each participant of the campaign took over our Instagram story and showed our viewers, what community meant to them, some of their favourite local businesses, while completing random acts of kindness. Our goal was blown away as we completed over 200 random acts of kindness combined between both cities! Keep an eye out for our next Travelling Sweater and Random Acts of Kindness this Holiday Season.

Read more about our Traveling Sweater Campaigns by checking out our YYC blog and YEG blog!

Collection Launches

We are thrilled to announce our most recent collection launch, the Local Collection. The Local Collection includes both the Giving Toque and the Local Crew, each item with its own unique social purpose. The Giving Toque is the first product in the Local Collection, that aims to support our initiative of building community by giving back. As it says in its name, with every Giving Toque purchased we will give a toque to a Canadian homeless organization, such as Calgary’s own The Drop-in Centre. Our goal for the remainder of 2017 is to donate over 1000 toques by Christmas. The Local Crew showcases a brand new, Canadian inspired design, with the purpose of highlighting the importance of Made in Canada clothing.

Read more about the Giving Toque here!

ATB Boostr Campaign

In the midst of building community even further by making a purpose-driven clothing line. We partnered with ATB Boostr to foster more growth in creating and launching our Local Collection. As 100 per cent made in Canada collection line we aim to put our dollars back into the Canadian economy and reduce our carbon footprint while we’re at it. We decided to work with ATB Boostr because just like our mission statement says, everything we do has to be about building community. We thought by sharing our story and goals out we could enable the community to take part in our mission as well. To share with everyone the need for socially responsible clothing and the importance of helping those in need to help make our community better, whether that community is your city, province or country. We are hoping to raise $10,000 during our campaign, through offering exclusive rewards that will showcase The Local Collection and other Community Builders in order to fund our next iteration of The Local Collection.

Read more about our ATB Booster and boost our campaign here.

Where You Can Find Us

You can always find us on our online store, but in case you’re out and about here’s where you can find us: Canadian Fashion Experience (Banff), Kokito (Prince Edward County), Little Brick Cafe and General Store (Edmonton), Lukes Drug Mart (Calgary), Meraki Supply Co (Calgary), Mountain Air Clothing (Jasper), Pika Village (Banff), Steeling Home (Calgary), Stuff4Him (Calgary), The Clothing Bar (Calgary), The Sporting Life (Calgary) and Twelve 21 (Canmore). For a full list check out our Store Locator Page!

From the beginning, we wanted to create impact and give back to our community with a goal of donating 1 million dollars. So far to date, we have donated approx. $10,000 dollars combined between clothing and cash donations to local charities across Canada. 

Don’t think we are doing enough to build community? Think there are areas that we could be doing better? Want to get involved somehow? Happy to hear collaboration ideas, thoughts, comments or rude remarks. Give us a shout at info@locallaundry.ca

Love,

Connor, Dustin, Briare and Kathleen