GOODS is a workers owned cooperative.
From Berlin to Beijing, from design to production, from theory to practice, GOODS delivers highest quality products, building according to a collaborative market socialist model.
Currently, some of our raw materials come from regular commercial companies, but we are actively reaching out to and starting to make deals with other worker’s collectives, and especially in the global South. Our aim for the operation is to one day soon become, from beginning to finish of the entire process, 100% workers lead, workers owned, with all proceeds benefitting the workers themselves. Our aim for the brand is to become a household name for street and sportswear (yes, we are working on other garments), to materially support global leftist movements, and to spread revolutionary ideas far and wide.
DESIGN
Hidden on a quiet street in former GDR, with Ernst Thälmann Platz on one side and what used to be called “LSD Park” on the other, blocks away from buildings with WW2 shrapnel and machine gun pock marks, is the GOODS design studio. This neighbourhood was a meeting place of East German artists and thinkers; and after the fall, a law-less place of squats, alternative spaces, unregistered bars, underground clubs, in other words, stereotypical Berlin “poor but sexy” hipsterdom. And today, a gentrified area of organic smoothies, yuppie families, and quiet evenings. GOODS draws from and encompasses all of these historical layers.
Imperialists temporarily “won” the cold-war here with vicious economic attacks and vile deception of trusting citizens of a socialist country not accustomed to being lied to by officials, but the deep roots of revolutionary socialism are far from dead. In this city, numerous and varied leftist currents flow, some more counter-culture, some more Marxist and (authentically) progressive, at various degree of visibility. Even the start-up bros are all talking about socialist ideas, though not recognised or identified as such: better ways to do things, “flat hierarchies”, more democracy in the work place, etc. And the Turkish vendor at the corner Spati keeps photos of socialist leaders and comrades behind the counter (no joke). In the GOODS studio, we de-colonise design, re-code mass communication, and re-envision both production and consumption in alignment with 21st Century socialism and beyond.
What will become of graphic design and design in general on the socialist road to high-tech egalitarian communism?
Trade will exist, as will consumption. Products will be made, and people will need to know about them. But in a sharing/gift economy design can (once again) become its essence, COMMUNICATION, released from the oppressive order to appeal to lowest common denominators, from the drudgery of being forced to “create value” for only the board of investors, from the boring and depressing prison of private profit.
Graphic design, like the advertising industry itself, will shift/mutate/evolve from the compulsion to manufacture artificial desire. Graphic design will shed the eat-or-starve directive to facilitate meaningless and frivolous over-consumption. And in this process, branding, story telling, typography, animation, visual effects, etc., will become increasingly free from the extremely narrow constraints of corporate capitalism, and creative paths previously unthinkable will be open for designers to explore.
Graphic design will become its essence: the search for the optimal point where how something looks interplay, amplify, and fuse with what it means.
Aesthetics will be finally reconnected with meaning.
WESTERN OPERATION
October 2021: after a year of many problems with our Western Operations facilities and system, such as supply-chain breakdown in the USA during the Covid pandemic as well as evictions, snow-balling on top of each other, we have switched to a print-on-demand outsourcing model for production and shipping. As you can see in the shop, this has expanded our creative possibilities; and you will notice upon ordering, will ensure a speedy delivery of goods.
PROGRAMMING
As GOODS continues on our path toward becoming a household name around the world, we are joined by a programming force from the Southern part of Berlin. More info soon.
EASTERN OPERATION
At the same time as the Western Operation re-launches and resumes, Eastern Operation based in the People’s Republic of China will be launching shortly. More info soon.