As we watch the light return and enjoy our crisp snowy landscape, we find ourselves ever grateful for our community of customers, Alaskan small businesses, nonprofit organizations, and neighbors. I (Jen) am typing this message in the window of our little shop, next to our community-created "Tree of Love" - a tree made from scraps of wood, wire and old bicycle parts with notes written by our customers and friends, notes of love and connection. (
feel free to add to it anytime in February!)
Lately, when I am not writing my congresspeople or getting some much needed exercise in our crisp winter air, number crunching for Blue Market AK has been taking up my headspace, as I dive deep into our 2025 stats - like how many Alaskan vendors we supported (124 = 68% of all of our vendors), how many unique AK-made and -grown products we carried (1,028 = 43% of all of our products), how many plastic containers, bags, boxes our customers saved from the landfill by refilling instead of buying new (~52,581).
And finally, today, those numbers are ready to be shared with the world! (See images below.)
Other accomplishments include donating 1% of our gross profits to four Alaskan nonprofits, supporting efforts for Western Alaskans who were displaced, donating to auctions, giving presentations at schools and events, holding space for Alaskan artists and makers, and employing 9-12 lovely individuals. Jen and Jess also joined other organizations as volunteers or board members - like ACAT's Plastic Free 907, and the Alaska Food Policy Council.
Oh! I almost forgot!! We were recognized as the U.S. Small Business Administration "Alaska Women-Owned Business Persons of the Year." We were humbly surprised to be the recipients of such a prestigious honor.
For those of you who would like to see more details, scroll down and read! If you are really a spreadsheet/data nerd and you want even more nitty gritty of some of our sales stats from the last 4 years, take a peek at the spreadsheet posted on our website, where I crunched our numbers since 2022 and realized we and YOU, our customers, saved at least
178,649 single use packages from the landfill from 2022-2025! Here is the link to the spreadsheet.
It can be a hard road, waking up every day and hoping this little business (we think of her as the pre-teen "child" of Jess and Jen) will continue to thrive. So, crunching these numbers and seeing our impact makes it worth the effort and gives us that renewed strength to keep on keeping on. Thank you, we hope to see you and your friends walking into our little social enterprise with your bag of empty jars clanking and ready to be refilled.
We will continue to bring Sustainability, Transparency, Community-Mindedness and a Localvore Alaskan green grocer option to this community we love and live in.
