Buy Nothing New Month: The Quiet Before the Sale

Every October, there’s this gentle little campaign that floats by: Buy Nothing New Month. Most people don’t even know it’s a thing. But I’ve always liked the idea of it — a collective pause before the chaos of November, when the world seems to shout “More! Faster! Cheaper!”

It’s meant to make us think about what we really need. And, if I’m honest, it always makes me think about what it means to run a business in a world that doesn’t really stop.

Because soon, Black Friday arrives — and everything changes.

My complicated relationship with Black Friday

Black Friday is strange. It’s exhilarating and exhausting all at once.
For small businesses like ours, it’s a vital moment. It helps us reward the people who’ve supported us, clear the stock that needs to move before a new year of making, and reach new people who might never have discovered us otherwise.

But it also represents something I find deeply uncomfortable — the frenzy of it all. The pressure. The sense that everything must be on sale, all the time. The way it turns value into a race to the bottom.

And yet, I don’t believe in boycotting it. Life isn’t black and white. There’s a lot of grey. We can’t simply reject the system we live in — but we can choose how we show up inside it.

The system we built around “more”

If you step back far enough, it’s easy to see how we got here.
In the 1990s, when growth started slowing in Western economies, we found a shortcut — make more things, more cheaply, somewhere else. Factories in China and beyond filled that gap. Prices dropped. Shelves filled. “New” became the default.

It worked, but only in the way a bandage works. The wound underneath kept growing. We built an economy that needs us to keep consuming just to stay standing. Journalist Steven Pearlstein writes about this in Can American Capitalism Survive? — how capitalism slowly drifted from a system built on shared prosperity to one that rewards extraction.

You see it everywhere: in the bargain bins, the planned obsolescence, the things that break too easily. “Cheap” became the goal, not the warning sign.

And now we’re left competing — as small makers, as conscious consumers — against a machine built for speed and scale.

Buying with purpose — even when it’s on sale

But maybe Buy Nothing New Month isn’t really about buying nothing. Maybe it’s about buying with purpose.

For me, that means pausing before I buy and asking:
Do I actually need this?
Will it last?
Who made it — and what do they stand for?

At The Australian Natural Soap Company, that’s what guides every decision. We don’t make products to fill shelves or chase trends. We make things with purpose — because there’s a better way to care for your skin and the planet.

So yes, we’ll show up for Black Friday. We’ll go big — but we’ll go meaningfully. Because to me, this isn’t about rejecting the season. It’s about reclaiming it. Turning the noise into something worth listening to.

Because this season, it’s not about buying nothing.
It’s about buying like it matters.

Soapy hugs,
Emma xx