Good News in 2025: Reflecting on Good Store’s Mission

An end-of-year musing on what you’ve helped Good Store accomplish (and a peek at what’s ahead) | Hank Green, Good Store Co-Founder

Every December, it feels like I find myself staring at a blinking cursor, trying to summarize a year that has felt both incredibly long and impossibly fast. It’s like trying to write a blog post about a big, beautiful wave while currently surfing the big beautiful wave. But I must do it, even if I have had a little too much tea, so here I am trying to slow down for a moment and take inventory of the good. And this year, thanks to you, there has been a seriously unreasonable amount of it.

When we started Good Store, it definitely wasn’t because the world needed more stuff. We mostly have enough stuff. It was because we believed things could be made differently; that commerce could be aligned with compassion, sustainability, and long-term change instead of short-term gain. You don’t build a better world with one big heroic gesture. You build it with thousands of people making a million tiny choices. One pair of socks. One bar of soap. One gift chosen with intention. One group of people trying out a new business model. Those choices add up, and this year, they really, really, really added up.

Impact You Can Feel (Because You Created It)

Across all our Good Store product lines—from EcoGeek to Sun Basin Soap to the delightfully-wild-in-all-the-best-ways Awesome Socks Club—you helped generate profit that didn’t stay with us. It moved outward. It went to work.

Thanks to your purchases, subscriptions, and general enthusiasm (plus the occasional unhinged comment left on our socials, please never stop), Good Store continued its mission of giving 100% of profits to Partners In Health and the Coral Reef Alliance. And that support isn’t abstract. It is literal, tangible change.

This year, PIH celebrated the opening of the Maternal Center of Excellence in Kono, Sierra Leone, a project many years in the making. This hospital will radically improve maternal and newborn health in a country where giving birth is still far too dangerous. One of the most remarkable, delightful examples of how you helped this center become reality came from our collaboration with Alec Watson of Technology Connections. Together, we launched a limited sock subscription that was simultaneously silly, extremely charming, and surprisingly thirsty for your collective desire to put gadgets on your ankles. And because you all are absolute champions of chaos-for-good, that collaboration ended up raising hundreds of thousands for the MCOE.

Let me say that again: a sock subscription helped fuel the construction of a maternal health facility that will serve countless families for generations. If anyone ever tells you whimsy isn’t worth it, please show them this.

And that’s only part of the picture. This year, your support also helped PIH continue its critical work combating tuberculosis. TB is still one of the deadliest infectious diseases in the world, despite being preventable and treatable. Your Keats & Co purchases helped PIH expand access to rapid diagnostics, strengthen community-based treatment programs, and support care teams who are working to catch cases earlier and keep patients supported throughout long, difficult treatment courses. In places where TB can devastate families and entire communities, your choices helped build the systems, staffing, and science needed to turn the tide. You gave people care, time, and hope—all by buying things you were going to buy anyway.

And EcoGeek deserves real credit here, too. Through your purchases, you helped support the Coral Reef Alliance and its efforts to safeguard fragile reef ecosystems facing climate pressure. Coral reefs are living infrastructure that support countless species and entire coastal communities. Your purchases continue to help give them a fighting chance.

A Few Good Things Ahead

No end-of-year reflection is complete without a little teasing about the future, so here’s just a fraction of what’s cooking.

First: Next year’s Awesome Socks Club lineup is (once again) my favorite. I realize I say this annually, but the artists we’re working with have created socks that are joyful, strange, elegant, bold, and occasionally confusing in a way that makes me shout “YES” at my computer.

Second: EcoGeek is growing, not in a “corporate takeover” way, but in a “we’re sourcing more things that solve actual cleaning problems without ruining the planet” way. People have been asking for a couple of household staples that badly need reinvention, and we’re finally ready to meet that challenge.

Third: Good Store as a whole continues to lean even more fully into ethical, delightful, practical products. Stuff that feels good to use and good to buy. Stuff that proves the future can be fun and functional and fair.

And beneath all of it is our ongoing commitment to giving: strengthening systems, fighting inequity, supporting communities that have been underserved for far too long.

A Small Reflection Before We Turn the Page

As we close out the year, I hope you take a second to recognize your part in all of this. Your choices built clinics; they trained workers; they changed outcomes; they created ripples with a radius so much larger than any of us can see.

I always want to say “I can’t thank you enough,” but actually, I can… as long as I keep doing it. So thank you. Thank you for building something real with us. Thank you for letting us use delight as a delivery system for structural change. Thank you for believing that commerce doesn’t have to be extractive; it can be collaborative, and it can be a force for progress.

Here’s to 2026. And to more good news along the way.