For Goldune, a new online store for environmentally friendly home goods, sustainability is a spectrum. “Sustainable” is a buzzword these days, most often used as a way to sell more stuff. Goldune makes specific an otherwise vague and misleading term by breaking it down into a few components: whether it’s biodegradable or compostable to whether it was made with clean energy or with zero waste. And to help you navigate the often confusing nature of sustainability, everything at Goldune comes with a literal rating on a sustainability spectrum ranging from “Super Sustainable” to “Getting Better.”
Read More
Azora Zoe Paknad founded Goldune in 2020 to curate all of her favorite sustainable products — from home decor and food to snacks and personal grooming — in one place. The site’s name is a transliteration of the world “گلدان,” which means “flower vessel” in Farsi, Paknad’s first language. “If I wanted to get really deep about it, I’d say we’re a vessel for nature, ” she says. “But to tell you the truth, I just liked the sound, spelling and compound wordiness of the English transliteration.”
While sustainability seems to be everywhere nowadays, it’s only really entered the national conversation within the last couple years. (You’ll remember the plastic straw bans everyone seemed to hop on.) A website like Goldune may seem long overdue, but it’s actually just now ushering in a new type of sustainable shopping. “We’re part of a new wave of retailers iterating on existing concepts (like selling home and lifestyle goods, or selling sustainable goods, or in our case, combining the two into something new) and if we’d started sooner there’d have been nothing to iterate on,” Paknad says.
Goldune isn’t here to shame everyone into turning into a composting, shoe-less hippie, and is avoiding what Paknad calls “fear based marketing, all-or-nothing energy [and] the shame and judgment that a lot of zero waste or sustainable retailers do.” The approachable nature of Goldune is seen in the friendly design and the items themself, which skew towards design-conscious millennials, who don’t want sustainability to outweigh looks.
Even behind the curtain, Goldune is building an inclusive community that goes against what Paknad calls “mainstream sustainable shopping” that “largely appeals to wealthy white folks.” The store makes a conscience effort to stock products and brands from women and the BIPOC community. As of the first financial quarter in 2021, 72 percent of the brands Goldune stocks are led by women, and 39 percent of the brands are BIPOC founded.
