{"id":1309,"date":"2024-08-19T07:55:42","date_gmt":"2024-08-19T07:55:42","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/follow-the-things.onyx-sites.io\/?p=1309"},"modified":"2026-03-06T19:16:03","modified_gmt":"2026-03-06T19:16:03","slug":"followthethings-com-shopping-bag","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/followthethings.com\/?p=1309","title":{"rendered":"followthethings.com Shopping Bag"},"content":{"rendered":"
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followthethings.com<\/strong>
My shopping bag<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n

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2011<\/a><\/div>\n\n\n\n
FOLLOWTHETHINGS.COM<\/a><\/div>\n\n\n\n
REUSABLE SHOPPING BAG<\/a><\/div>\n\n\n\n
MADE IN CHINA<\/a><\/div>\n\n\n\n
USED IN THE UK<\/a><\/div>\n\n\n\n
COMMODITY<\/a><\/div>\n\n\n\n
IT-NARRATIVE<\/a><\/div>\n\n\n\n
ENCOURAGE DETECTIVE WORK<\/a><\/div>\n\n\n\n
MAKE IT META<\/a><\/div>\n\n\n\n
HAVE IT MADE<\/a><\/div>\n\n\n\n
TRACK & TRACE<\/a><\/div>\n\n\n\n
ENCOURAGE CURIOSITY<\/a><\/div>\n\n\n\n
ADD TO THE MIX<\/a><\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div><\/div>\n\n\n\n

“followthethings.com Shopping Bag<\/strong>“
A limited edition run of 5,000 reusable plastic shopping bags designed by Daisy Livingston & Aidan Waller and distributed freely to support the launch of the followthethings.com website.
The last bag was given away in 2016. Still in circulation.

The followthethings.com launch team are keen to create some merchandise to promote their website. Intern Daisy had submitted a printed cotton bag she had had manufactured in China as coursework for Ian’s ‘Geographies of Material Culture’ module. It was the most original, imaginative coursework he had ever seen. That’s because it wasn’t just about the geographies of material culture, it embodied them, materialised them. Ian hired Daisy as an intern and asked her to design and order some reusable shopping bags for followthethings.com’s launch. Fellow intern Aiden helped out. These needed to be just like the ones that we used for our supermarket shopping at Sainsbury’s, Tesco, ASDA, Morrisons. They were pretty standard in their construction. But where were they made? From what materials? How could you find out? What could you find out about the pay and conditions of the people who made them? Quite a bit, it turned out, if you had your own made in the same places. What insights could this privileged business-to-business customer perspective provide? And what could happen after you put these mischievous shopping bags into circulation? Especially when the meaning of ‘shopping’ in the project – and on the bags – was double: i.e. both ‘to seek or examine goods, property, etc. offered for sale in or by’ and<\/em> ‘to behave treacherously toward; inform on; betray’ or ‘to give away information about’ those goods, property, etc. (Anon nd). Once you read about our bag, you can apply its lessons to the ones that you have…<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Page reference: Ian Cook et al (2024) followthethings.com Shopping Bags.<\/em> followthethings.com\/followthethings-com-shopping bag.shtml (last accessed <insert date here>)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Estimated reading time: 21 minutes.<\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n

The story<\/h1>\n\n\n\n
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We need to develop forms of critique that inspire hauntings, feed feelings, come alive, leap out and grab us, \u2026 that are not just about vital materiality but are themselves vitally material.<\/h3>\n\n\n\n

Ian Cook & Tara Woodyer (2012 p.238).<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

1. Introduction<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

In 2011 the team that created the original followthethings.com website designed, commissioned, followed and distributed 5,000 reusable shopping bags that were made in China. We wanted some followthethings.com merchandise to help promote the site when it launched. We didn’t want only to think<\/em> about the lives of things, but with<\/em> them too. We loved the double meaning in English of the verb ‘to shop’. It wasn’t only a matter of going to the shops to buy things, it could also mean betraying the origins of things, like you might \u2018shop\u2019 a person to the police. And our project wasn’t only<\/em> about other people’s trade justice activism. We wanted to create our own too. Our website was one example (see Cook et al 2017). The bags were another. The approach we took is called ‘critical making’ (see Cook et al 2014, cf Ingold 2007, Hawkins 2011, Last 2012). But what could we learn about trade geographies from this making process? And what could we do with the bags once they were made?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Check out the other examples on our site whose actvism has involved having things made -> here<\/a>.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

2. Why make bags? <\/h2>\n\n\n\n

followthethings.com is a massive collaborative project \u2018orchestrated\u2019 by me, Ian Cook. Undergraduate students taking my ‘Geographies of Material Culture’ module at the University of Exeter in the UK have researched the first drafts of most of its ‘compilation’ pages (i.e. the ones full of quotations) and most of its ‘follow it yourself’ pages. Over the years, many have been employed as interns to work these compilation pages up for publication on the site. Daisy Livingston was one of the first. In January 2011, she submitted a cotton shopping bag containing some documents as her coursework. She\u2019d had a batch of these bags made in a factory in China. The documents were the shipping documents and printouts of email conversations she\u2019d had with factory. This was the most original, imaginative coursework I had ever seen. I asked Daisy and four other students if they’d like to work with me as interns that summer on a website I wanted to launch soon. I asked her, specifically, to design and order some followthething.com-branded reusable shopping bags. Like the Sainsbury’s and Tesco bags I had at home at the time (see below).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Sainsburys elephant bag (Ferrer 2021) & Tesco’s ladybird bag (ambernectar 13 2013).<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

She told me she’d decided where to get her bags made via a website called alibaba.com. So we searched for these supermarket and other reusable plastic shopping bags there<\/a>, looked through countless pages of product photos, and clicked the ones we recognised. We ended up on alibaba.com pages which named and provided the addresses of factories where they were made. These pages said how much they would cost to make and who to talk to about placing an order. We wanted to design our bag so that it could be easily mistaken for the supermarket bags we knew, using the same kinds of materials (‘pp woven’ plastic, we learned) and colours. We chose a factory based in Shandong, and asked them to make our bags to the exact specification of a \u2018pp woven\u2019 bag we knew they had made for Sainsbury\u2019s, with the same orange handles. By placing an order for our bags, we were learning about the sourcing of theirs.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

3. Bag design<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

Our bags were designed in the summer of 2011 by Daisy and fellow intern Aidan Waller. We wanted them to be made to the same specification as our ‘rivals’ not only because we wanted them to be visually familiar to our shoppers, but also because we wanted them to feel physically identical too. The factory emailed us a bag template and asked us to place our design onto it. A reusable ‘pp woven’ shopping bag is made of 5 pieces: 2 handles, a bottom panel, and 2 identical main panels whose central pane is the long side of the finished bag, and whose end panes are half of their side panels. We started to experiment with what our bag could look like. There were a few iterations. We were new to this. We ordered 5000 bags because that was the minimum order.<\/p>\n\n\n

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