Let's Keep Winter Cold: Our Annual Donations are Ready!

Yet another challenging year, but we made it!

If 2020 was a year of Covid shock and adaptation, and 2021 continued to be a year of pandemic challenges and its (un)expected consequences, 2022 was a year when things started getting back to normal. At least in the health department.

With Covid, the world moved from knowing nothing, to knowing something - enough to develop an action plan to fight this global crisis. And what's important, the local consequences for not following the recommended steps have been pretty obvious - to almost every individual on our planet.

But have we forgotten about Climate Change now when a new global crisis is dominating the headlines? Some parts of our planet got a reminder in 2022 with the many extreme weather events.

If we just take the end of this year, we went from a heat wave that went for weeks, to a huge overnight temperature drop and snow. And the very end of this year has brought an extreme 'bomb cyclone' that raided the US and Canada. This life-threatening "blizzard of the century" came with extremely low temperatures and snow storms, making Americans and Canadians face mass outages, even on Christmas Day.  

And that's only on top of the "regular" and most obvious consequences of climate change that happened throughout the year - droughts, heatwaves, wildfires, retreating of glaciers, etc.

Photo by Christian Hoiberg

Vallerret Photography Gloves was built around a love of winter. We were founded on the ideology that winter is a season to be cherished and celebrated, not dreaded and avoided. We thrive in the cold crisp air and we rejoice after a fresh dump of snow. We have dedicated our entire livelihood to helping others love winter as much as we do and we want to do everything we can to keep winter around for as long as possible.

For these exact reasons, third year in a row we are donating 1% of our annual revenue to 1% for the Planet, a non-profit organization that bridges the gap between companies looking to make a difference and environmental nonprofits needing funding. They have created a growing alliance of businesses who recognize the severity of protecting the environment and who are dedicated to taking responsibility and we are proud to be apart of the movement.

As 2023 is about to launch, we are making our final donations to the organizations below. We carefully selected to partner with these organizations because of their extraordinary achievements so far as well as their connection to places like Lofoten which is an iconic location for photographers around the globe.

The Norwegian Society for Conservation:

The NWSC is the recipient we chose for our Black Friday donations. Instead of having a Black Friday sale, we promised to donate 100% of our proceeds to the Norwegian Society for Conservation to help further their efforts in protecting the Norwegian wilderness. We are particularly proud to support their efforts in protecting Lofoten, one of the most iconic Arctic locations for photography.

Protect Our Winters:

Protect Our Winters (POW) is a global nonprofit that helps passionate outdoor people protect the places and lifestyles they love from climate change. They are a community of athletes, scientists, creatives, and business leaders advancing non-partisan policies that protect our world today and for future generations. Through their advocacy, they work to educate, register and turn out enough voters to shift governmental responses to the climate crisis

The Conservation Alliance:

The Conservation Alliance is a group of like-mind companies that disburses its collective annual membership dues to grassroots environmental organizations. They direct funding to community-based campaigns to protect threatened wild habitat and outdoor recreation through rigorous grant proposal review processes that ensure the grants go to organizations that can succeed given the necessary financial resources.

We strive to make the best choices for the environment in production, but anyway you look at it, production creates pollution. We are very aware of that which is why we are committed to offsetting our climate impact by donating to these nonprofits.

We are far from perfect and while we know there is a lot of work to be done, we are excited to be taking the steps to conduct responsible, sustainable business and give back. We know we haven’t made these contributions on our own. Each contribution is a direct result of your purchases. Every glove, every beanie, every microfibre cloth helped contribute to our annual donation.

Photo by Pedro Kin

As we wrapped-up the 2022, we've had some time to reflect and contemplate. Being a part of our core values, we are happy to be recommitting ourself to another year of donations going into 2023 and we’d love to hear from you if there are any organizations you think we should know about who might also benefit from the funding.

Thanks to your patience, loyalty, and support. We made it through the year and we are truly grateful that you stood by us. We are eternally grateful for this passionate community of winter photographers and we can’t wait to bring you some exciting news in 2023.

Wishing you a year full of good times and photography adventures!