Happy Earth Day! What Makes a Product Good?

☘️Well well well, another earth day has arrived!🌱

We hope you enjoyed the last two blog posts leading up to earth day. In those we talked about how the environmental movement has evolved throughout the years, even thousands of years! And then of course leading up to the current state of the environmental movement. 

We hope you are enjoying your earth day, or earth mont! Of course everyday should be earth day, but it’s nice to take a day for extra appreciation from time to time. Celebrate however you want to honor the earth. This could look like setting new sustainability goals; it could look like cleaning up trash; or it could also include simply immersing oneself in nature!🥾

And in case you haven’t seen on our site, we are doing a little something as a company in celebration of earth day. For the whole month of April, if you buy a reusable product from LastObject we will be removing 1kg or 2lbs of plastic waste bound for the 🐋ocean with our partners at Plastic Bank.

That’s not all though, when you purchase something we’ll also be sending you a special #LOEarthDay post to share on social media and get the word out. If you share the post, we will plant a 🌳tree through OneTreePlanted. And if we reach 1,000 trees planted, we will match the trees planted...making it 2,000!

All of our reusable products on our site apply:

• LastSwab (Beauty or Basic)

• LastTissue

• LastRound

To check on our progress of trees planted, 🖱scroll down on our main page here!

How exciting right?! If there is an object that’s right for you, now it can have an even greater impact through collecting waste as well as planting trees! And since we are a product company, we figured it would be a good time to talk about products!

What makes a good product, a good product?

Is it the quality of materials being used, or is it the feel and texture that comes from that certain material?

Is it the feeling you get from buying that product, or even while using it?

Or is it the letters etched into, stamped, or plastered on, that makes a product...a good product? 

Should good products be incredibly different so that they are unique?

A lot of us may have a lot of ideas about what makes the objects we buy, good objects. But what are actually the best, most used things in our lives?

It’s probably not that super crazy gadget that is complex and only does this one thing.

No.

Our favorite things are the ones that get the job done.✅ They do it right, and they do it well. Additionally, a good product is one that’s built for the long haul. It’s built to last. We want to be able to rely on these products when we need them, and no one really likes having to replace things over and over again. That’s a pain.

🌈Life is right in front of us, and it’s a beautiful thing. It’s meant to be enjoyed, taken in deeply with every breath. And the objects we own shouldn’t distract us from it, if anything they should contribute to it, but without us noticing so much. 

In short, they should be out of the way.

When we are going about life, whether it be just the everyday flow, or even trotting ✈️around a far and distant land, our objects should be there to serve. Not to distract. That 🎒backpack or suitcase should be designed seamlessly so that you can take in all those new sites. Or that coffee mug should do just what we need it to, without causing us any unwanted stress.

Something like, say...our q tips for example, should be as minimal as possible: able to be portable and tucked away when not in use. This also means they should therefore be reusable. For many objects to be considered good ones, they ought to be reusable.

This is because a good product should be intentional. Intentional about the resources used, intentional about the space it will take up in people's lives, intentional about how it will affect the life of the planet. From birth, during, and at the end of the product when it’s ready to be discarded.

I know this doesn’t sound too exciting. But let’s save the exciting part for the stuff that matters...which isn’t stuff at all!

The best products in the world won’t bring us happiness. LastObjects won’t bring us happiness. They may, if purchased with intention, prove useful and contribute to our quality of life, but they won’t fill the void that can only be filled with more ⛷experiential parts of life.

So, maybe the brand etched into the product does matter, but in the sense that we want the company to be aligned with our values. We want them to do their part in making the world a better place.👍🏽

Maybe the quality of materials does matter, and also the footprint of said materials. And of course maybe the feel of those materials can ensure less distraction from our lives that we live.

A lot goes into choosing a good product. And even more goes into building one.

We won’t find the solutions to our life’s problems in the products we buy. We won’t find an all of a sudden happiness in them either, aside from an initial burst of endorphins with purchase.

But we can find products that add value to our lives. We can purchase products that send a ✊🏽message to the world about a certain issue we care about. We can add things to our lives with intention, and because that object is right for us. Not because everyone else has one.

Products won’t solve our environmental issues, not alone anyways. But, we cannot fully solve our environmental problems without solving our product problem.

So, what truly makes a product, or object, a good one?

The truth is, a product is good if it meets the standards that we ourselves have set for it. When it meets a certain criteria, that is good enough for us. And those criteria are different for everyone. It’s only when we start using others’ criteria that we begin to allow bad objects into our lives.💚