A Note from Karen Hartman, Founder & Designer, Astor & Orion — Seattle

April 22nd, 2026

Earth Day Is Just Wednesday

I started Astor & Orion because I couldn’t un-know what I knew.

I’d spent years working inside large-scale manufacturing in Asia — close enough to global supply chains to understand exactly what they cost. Not in the abstract. The actual cost: to workers, to water, to the communities around factories that operated without oversight.

But I also saw what manufacturing gave. Real jobs. Products people wanted and needed. In China during those years, factory work pulled hundreds of millions of people into the middle class. That’s not a footnote — it’s one of the most significant economic transformations in human history. I’ve never been able to look at a factory as inherently the problem. The problem is a factory that answers to no one — not the workers inside it, not the community outside the gates.

And when I had my son, and I was dreaming up my own brand on maternity leave, I knew I couldn’t work with one of those.

Sustainability wasn’t something I added later. It was the starting point. Recycled metals — not because it became trendy, but because sending new metal into circulation when recycled metal exists made no sense to me. Small batch production — not as a marketing angle, but because overproduction is waste I refused to create. A manufacturing partner with verified labor practices, environmental management systems, and third-party certification — not because a retailer required it, but because I knew what uncertified supply chains looked like and I wasn’t working with one.

Finding the right partner was one of the hardest parts of building this brand. I needed someone who brought the same love of process to manufacturing that I bring to designing. Someone who had spent years building real systems — water filtration, low employee turnover, full transparency — and could prove it. I found them. They hold four independent certifications: SMETA 4-Pillar, ISO 9001, ISO 14001, and ISO 45001, audited on-site by Intertek. Not a goal on a report. A verified outcome, confirmed on-site by a third party using a rigorous inspection protocol.

Over time that partnership has grown. When we started working together, they held a 2-pillar SMETA certification — covering labor standards and health and safety. But the numbers told a deeper story: paid time off, maternity leave, benefits above the legal minimum — and an extremely low employee turnover rate that said everything. People stayed. Which told me the culture of respect was real, not dressed up for an audit.

Between the 2024 and 2025 audits, they moved to 4-pillar, adding environment and business ethics. That matters to me not as a credential upgrade, but as evidence of something I actually believe: sustainability isn’t a fixed list you check off. It’s a practice. Systems that get built, then improved, then verified again.

I’d done my own research on base wages before we ever signed anything. I felt confident about what I was seeing when visiting the facility — but I couldn’t confirm it officially. The 2025 audit did that work. A formal living wage analysis, verified against the real cost of housing, food, healthcare, and education in the region where our jewelry is made. It confirmed what I already believed to be true. I’m proud of that — not because the audit changed anything, but because it proved it. And because it reflects something we share: a genuine commitment to continuous improvement.

That’s the difference between a commitment and an outcome.

This is what I think about when I see Earth Day campaigns from brands that discovered sustainability last year. Not with contempt — with something closer to exhaustion. Because the work isn’t a campaign. It doesn’t have a launch date or a hashtag. It’s the decision you make when you’re designing your first batch of samples. It’s the manufacturer you walk away from because they can’t answer your questions. It’s the certifications you pursue before anyone is asking.

Every piece I make is cast from recycled metals and designed to be fully recyclable when you’re done with it. That’s been the intention from the start — not the Earth Day start, not the press mention start. The actual start.

Earth Day is for everyone else. For us, it’s just Wednesday.