This Savvy New Site Only Sells Products That Last A Lifetime
All thanks to a casserole dish! It was a Le Creuset pan that sparked Tara Button’s business idea. [Photo: Instagram/lecreuset]
How many times have you cursed as you toss away another scratched-to-bits frying pan or a leaky kettle? Well now a genius new website plans to help people swap their lasts-a-few-months products for ones that last-a-lifetime.
Buy Me Once, aims to be the go-to place for the most long-lasting products around and the premise is so deliciously simple you wonder why no one thought of it before.
The brains behind the blurb is entrepreneur Tara Button. Inspired by her long-lasting Le Creuset casserole dish, Tara started to believe there must be more products out there with a lifetime guarantee, or at the very least some sort of promise from the manufacturer that they are designed to stand the test of time. But when she searched the internet she couldn’t find one site which gathered together those super-durable products. Tara had the light-bulb moment to create such a site, but as an advertising creative and children’s book author, she didn’t have much spare time to do anything about it.
“I tried hard to ignore the idea, but it wouldn’t go away,” Tara told MNN. “It kept on coming back up in my head. When I would read the news about the environment and about the waste we produce, I felt almost sick. I would get this visceral, itchy feeling inside that told me: ‘You can do something about this.’ I finally got to the point where I was like 'I have to make this site.’”
Entrepreneur Tara Button is making a stand against throwaway products. [photo: Instagram/buymeonce]
At first she worked on the idea after work and at weekends, but in January this year she finally quit her day job to focus on the project full time. The idea is to pull together the products offering the best in longevity for every kind of item imaginable, from cutlery and clothing to luggage and children’s toys.
Buy Me Once! Some of the products Tara wants to see on her new site. [Photos: Instagram/buymeonce]
And Tara isn’t the only one who’s rebelling against mass-produced throwaway items. Nudie now offer free repairs on their jeans, while Jigsaw’s ‘For life not landfill’ campaign last autumn saw the brand styling customers’ ‘old favourites’ with their new collection, in ‘the perfect antidote to the endless trends and throwaway fast fashion culture, proving that Jigsaw clothes really do stand the test of time’.
Right now, most of the site is available to shoppers in the US and UK, and Tara is working on getting every item available from each country. And the ambition doesn’t stop there. Eventually Tara hopes Buy Me Once can become a ‘kite mark’ of longevity so that manufacturers would be able to say ‘this is a buy me once kettle.’
A kettle that lasts a lifetime, now you’re talking? Cuppa anyone?
What do you think about the new site? Let us know @YahooStyleUK.
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