Introducing Mint™ Sleeves, a new venture from Fuzz Club
In partnership with Canada’s Vinyl Storage Solutions, we’re super excited to announce a new Fuzz Club venture called Mint™. Launching today, Mint deals in premium archival record sleeves that are 100% recyclable, non-toxic, PVC-free, crystal-clear and of the highest quality – all designed with your dearly-cherished record collection in mind. You can find out more and buy the sleeves here.
In an industry awash with them, these sleeves are far from cheaply-produced products. The man behind the sleeves, Mike Sarazin, spent 15 years in the Canadian Army as a combat engineer and also has over 25 years' worth of experience in the manufacturing sector working across a vast array of products and processes. As an avid record collector, in 2019 Mike set up VSS in his garage and turned his attention to developing the best sleeves on the market for vinyl lovers looking to safely and securely store their valuable collections.
Fast forward to today and the patented dual pocket sleeves and overall quality of the VSS sleeves have become hugely popular in the vinyl community and the business has grown exponentially – with pretty much every vinyl YouTuber raving about the sleeves, over 2 million sleeves sold in 2021 alone and Mike receiving 1000s of emails and phone calls over the last few years from many a thankful collector. Set to expand in 2022, us and VSS have now agreed a European license for the sleeves which will now be sold exclusively under the Mint™ brand in the UK and Europe.
As record collectors, everyone at the label was blown away by the quality of the VSS sleeves. Not only do the crystal-clear sleeves look better on the shelf (and never going cloudy over time) but they offer far superior protection to anything else out there – particularly against seam splits, which have become an all too common problem keeping record collectors up at night. For more info on how exactly our sleeves will prolong the life of your records better than anything else – and not actively harm them over time like the majority of sleeves on the market – head here.
The ‘mint’ in our name doesn’t just refer to the condition the sleeves will keep your records in but was also chosen out of an awareness of the need to be green in this endeavour. This is something Mike has put at the forefront of Vinyl Storage Solutions since its inception. As well as being 100% recyclable, PVC-free and non-toxic, all materials used in manufacturing (aside from the inner sleeves) are short-travelled and sourced from the US and Canada. Together, Mint and Vinyl Storage Solutions are currently looking into manufacturing the sleeves in Europe so as to reduce our carbon footprint even further.
These sleeves are an end-product designed to protect your records over decades and as such are a far better solution than shrink-wrap, which really is something we all need to stop using. So for us as a record label and broker, we want our releases to be packaged in the dual pocket sleeves at the manufacturing stage so we can not only prevent sleeves from damage in transit but also limit waste by doing away with shrink wrap. Therefore, Mint’s mission will also include looking to supply pressing plants directly in order to make this option available to record labels such as our own at the manufacturing stage.
