Goose has built a deeply engaged community through years of incredible music and thoughtfully designed experiences. They understand that every detail shapes the connection they create with their fans. The music, the artwork, the merchandise, and the environment all become part of the experience.
That belief is something we share.
At A New Earth Project, we believe the choices we make communicate what we value. The materials we use, the products we design, and the way merchandise is packaged all become part of the experience. They tell a story about what matters.
For the band’s BIG MODERN! Experience + Pop-Up Shop during its sold-out Madison Square Garden run this summer, that shared perspective became the foundation of a collaboration. We teamed up with Goose for the three-day retail activation at The Drop House on East 14th Street, helping replace conventional single-use plastic packaging with New Earth Approved alternatives, including SWAY seaweed-based bags and fiber-based packaging solutions.
For those three days, the lines stretched for blocks, with thousands of fans waiting hours just to step inside. The pop-up itself became an experience, with music playing, visual art on the walls, fashion and physical media throughout the space.
Inside was a capsule collection by designer Dawn Dunning, alongside a curated gallery of limited-edition posters and prints created for the MSG shows by Chris Benchetler, Marq Spusta, and David Welker. The space also featured Goose’s growing vinyl collection, with records available along with exclusive apparel and limited-edition merchandise created for the occasion.
We've been Goose fans for a long time and grew even closer to the band after they played at Park City Song Summit last year, an event sponsored by A New Earth Project. When the opportunity came to collaborate, saying yes was easy.
The deeper reason came from the ideas behind the album.
BIG MODERN!, the band's sixth studio record, is a glimpse of the world we are all living in right now. Underneath the 80s-inspired pop-rock sound, the album is touching on an honest reflection, emphasizing how overstimulated, scattered, and disconnected we have become inside our hyper-connected, digital-dopamine lives. And the album's quiet critique of modern disconnection and our mission to restore connection feel like two sides of the same conversation.
A New Earth Project's work is to restore connection between people (us), industry, and the natural world. The way we go about that work might be the most important part of it. We don't lecture anyone about sustainability or try to convince people to care. We go where people are already gathering and we meet them right there in the middle of it. A concert or an album release, or a Pop-up installation full of people who drove hours just to be together in an experience created by one of their favorite bands is not a detour from the work we do, because that gathering is precisely where the work actually lives.
A significant factor to the packaging waste crisis we're experiencing comes down to how disconnected we have become from our own materials, from any real sense of where the material comes from or where it goes once we are finished with it. The packaging we brought to the pop-up is one small and concrete way of closing that gap.
The SWAY seaweed bags*, for example, were featured right there with the apparel, standing in for the conventional plastic garment bags you would normally expect. For anyone who hasn't come across it yet, SWAY makes packaging out of seaweed instead of plastic, using a resin called TPSea that is built from the natural polymers seaweed already produces on its own. The seaweed grows without any land, fresh water, or fertilizer, and the farming actually improves the health of the ocean rather than depletes it. Then, when the bag has served its useful life, the material breaks down cleanly in home and industrial compost.
The Sway Polybag is a small, tangible version of a much bigger idea, and that idea is really what this whole collaboration was about. For those three days, the two sides of that conversation - the disconnection the album names and the connection we work to restore - became one and the same. That is the work, and that is the world we are trying to weave back together, one gathering at a time.
* If you’re curious about how to get SWAY Polybags or any other New Earth Approved packaging solutions for your next event, visit www.newearthapproved.com or email us at team@anewearthproject.com.